November 30, 2007
Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
A dizzying force of a book, Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I picked it up based on Heather Mallick’s recommendation and was not disappointed. Perhaps the least self-serving memoir ever, Beijing Confidential serves instead to tell the story of China during the last thirty-five years, as an attempt to right wrongs, and as a stunning picture of Beijing today. It didn’t so much make me want to go there, no, but I feel like I was there, which is something.
Throughout her career Wong has discussed her experiences as a third-generation Chinese Canadian studying in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. An ardent Maoist, she was eager to conform to the society she found there, to renounce her bourgeois origins. She describes her young self as “that very dangerous combination: fanatic, ignorant and adolescent.” The extent of her devotion she demonstrated by reporting on a classmate who dared to ask her how she could get to America. In the chaos of the time, such a counterrevolutionary act could have brought forth any range of punishments– even death. And it is this experience which Wong revisits during her trip to Beijing.
Her husband and sons travel with her. She writes, “I am not only planning to chronicle the future of this great city; I also need to come to terms with my own past. For this I need moral support. I need my family to reassure me that I’m not a horrible human being. Or that, if I am, they love me anyway.” Her edges are softened in this context; she displays vulnerability, dares to admit she has made mistakes in her past. This is brave, I think. She has come to Beijing to find her former classmate– a seemingly impossible task in a city of millions– and it is through this quest that we come to discover the city.
Of course for Jan Wong vulnerability only extends so far– she remains gutsy, unsentimental and pulls no punches. Her approach gives us a fascinating perspective on Beijing– what is it to search for your own past in a city so eager to bulldoze its own? For, as Wong finds, Beijing is a bustle of construction. Particularly with the 2008 Olympics ahead, she is aware that this trip maybe her last chance to see that traditional Beijing she remembers from her time there as a student. Already the city is exploding with condo towers, new roads, mammoth shopping malls and uber-development. In this place she once knew so well, she is perpetually disoriented, and so is her reader, though fittingly and not for any lack of control on Wong’s part.
Her story is so deftly woven with past and present, the personal and the political, with the local and the universal. Beijing Confidential is an education as much as a story– fact: Mao banned pets!, for example– but all propelled by her quest for reconciliation. The quest is resolved in storied fashion, involving chance, understanding and some putrid fruit. Such a marvelously constructed narrative, and a memoir with so much worth telling.
November 29, 2007
Youth and Consequences
Non-fiction has taken over the household. Husband is currently reading The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass, and keeps proclaiming its greatness from the sofa. And I have begun my non-fiction commitment binge– I just finished Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I must admit that I am yet not suffering from lack of life as I thought I might have been. No, there was life aplenty in Wong’s book, and even if there hadn’t been, I am taking supplements of The Mitfords anyway. I don’t miss fiction yet. But there are five books still to go in my binge, and not all as narratively driven as Beijing Confidential either, so we shall see.
As a reader I will never cease to be fascinated by how unlikely books can inform one another by virtue of being read in close proximity. Though really it’s unsurprising to think about how much a book of letters between six infamous British aristocrats and a Canadian’s Maoist memoir/ travelogue might have in common– I just never considered. But both are in many ways concerned the political impressionability of youth– terrifyingly, really. How much power a young person can come to wield, unknowingly or otherwise. The predictability of it all as well: the twin yearnings for belonging and independence which are so often the root of political extremism. The ways in which consequences are so little considered reminded me of both India Knight’s recent column “The young’s invincibility illusion” and my recent reading of Esther Freud’s Love Falls. Anyway, more on this will be forthcoming in my reviews of both books.
November 28, 2007
Isn't work dreadful
“Susan isn’t work dreadful. Oh the happy old days when one could lie & look at the ceiling till luncheon time. I feel I shall never be right again until I’ve had trois mois de chaise lounge– & when will that be?” –Nancy Mitford to her sister Jessica, 1944
November 27, 2007
General Gorgeousness
Lately noticed: that whenever I’ve come across a beautiful book from Random House, its cover has been designed by someone called Kelly Hill. I am now reading Beijing Confidential, which bears Hill’s mark (which is her name and general gorgeousness). She also designed The Birth House, The Dirt on Clean, Cake or Death.
Last year the lovely Ami McKay posted an interview with Kelly Hill on her blog. Altogether unsurprisingly, Hill states, “I am drawn to book jackets that use illustrations, textures, whimsical elements — evidence that although books are mass produced, somebody made this cover.”
November 27, 2007
Charming lunacy
I do hope that India Knight and Andrew O’Hagan are still friends, even though they’re no longer an item. Only because O’Hagan’s piece in the LRB and Knight’s latest column are so complementary– and particularly timely as I’ve just started reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.
In his review of the book O’Hagan gets Mitfordness just right: “Never… have sentences appeared so rhythmically in tune with a sense of the ridiculous, or so ready to snigger at the disaster of common beliefs. In that the sense the book is a masterpiece– it contains the DNA of a national style– and in the future people will read it to understand both the charming lunacy of English manners and how a singular mode of self-hood could shape the language.”
And India Knight bemoans the end of letters, writing: “This is a plea for a return to pen and paper. Admittedly I am almost fetishistic in my love of stationery but there is nevertheless a real pleasure to be had in writing someone a proper letter and in taking care over it. And it’s likely to end up, well-thumbed and cherished, in some cache of effects for your grandchildren to find – as opposed to expiring when your computer does, lost for ever, disposable and ultimately meaningless.”
November 27, 2007
Board Games
It’s not bookish in the slightest, but I’ve certainly been doing a lot of reading since I started my job in May. Mostly proxy circulars from TSX composite which don’t tend be exciting, but today is exciting as the results of our research are published in the Globe & Mail‘s Board Games 2007. A must-link for all you who are passionate about corporate governance.
Which is, um, anyone?
Long live day jobs!
November 25, 2007
The Great Man by Kate Christensen
In my limited experience of Kate Christensen, I have found that she doesn’t conform well. Her novels aren’t easily classifiable, and they don’t have ulterior motives. She seems to me a writer who writes for the sake of her books. Who invests her fiction with the same humour and intelligence one might find within a life. Last month I read her first novel In the Drink, and I’ve just finished her latest The Great Man. Christensen started off promising, and now she is very good, and it’s just like Maud Newton says: she deserves to be better known.
The Great Man in question is Oscar Feldman, five years dead. A famous painter of the female nude, lately two biographers have been poking into his life story, stirring up trouble amongst the women Oscar surrounded himself with. His loyal wife Abigail, his mistress Teddy, his cantankerous sister Maxine (also a painter) and his daughters are forced to confront the legacy of this man whose presence had so overwhelmed their lives and continues to even after his death. Oscar’s “greatness” is re-evaluated after a fashion, and the women reconcile (as best they can) their feelings for each other.
Kate Christensen reminds me of Laurie Colwin, which not a lot of writers manage. Both writers redefining what “greatness” is– namely that it can feature that rare combination of humour and intelligence. With complicated and interesting female characters who have bodies, and jobs, and friends. With male characters in their lives who are just as interesting, and a story that does not rely on convention. An eye for the right details, to create a scene in all its vividness. There is joy here, and there’s goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.
November 25, 2007
More teacups
“Posh people had more jokes just as they had more teacups, and when they sat down to write both were in evidence.” –Andrew O’Hagan, “Poor Hitler”, reviewing The Mifords: Letters between Six Sisters
November 25, 2007
RR and Cake
My infinite list of favourite things about Rebecca Rosenblum includes the fact that we once decided our Serious Thursday writer meetings would involve cake in celebration of all our literary successes. A smart decision, I say now, considering the accomplishments of said Rosenblum and my love of cake. Congratulations to her on winning the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award for her brilliant collection of short stories.
