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Made in China >> Jan Wong on being a Red Guard who eats with the stars by JULIET WATERS
Still, the journalist in Jan Wong clearly misses China. "China's so wild, you can actually find amazing stories first hand. You can't find those in Toronto; you can search for days trying to find a good anecdote. In China it's spilling out all over, and you don't need to go through anybody else. The Chinese have been through so much that almost anyone you interview will have an incredible story. Which is why I think my book keeps people's attention--because I talk mostly with ordinary people." And true enough, Jan Wong's China offers more than just a taste of what it's like to live in nation that, on the surface, seems to be jumping from Third World to First World at breakneck speed. What it's like to go from no phones to cell phones and from no information to Internet access. What it's like to be gay in China, to be a working single mother, or even what it's like simply to date in a country that's never dated. What it's like to be a peasant who's become rich enough to build a castle in a rice paddy, but also what it's like to be a migrant worker with little hope of ever achieving that, or a sweatshop worker with even less. And finally, what's it's like to be a journalist witnessing one of the most fascinating cultural transitions in the history of the world. "Now," she says somewhat wistfully about her "Lunch with Jan Wong" column in the Globe and Mail, "I interview celebrities." A job she says she's made for because of her experience as a radical youth, not despite it. After three decades of wrestling with the Chinese government--first as a student in the '70s, then as a foreign correspondent between 1988-94 and eventually travelling through China this year as an author whose last book, Red China Blues, is banned--not much intimidates her. Certainly not the publicitycrats who grease the wheels of the North American cult of celebrity. When I quote someone who complained that the snitchy, holier-than-thou tone of her columns proves that she's still just a Red Guard at heart, she laughs. "I think that's a very good point. I judge people. I'm an old Maoist in the sense that I'm very judgmental. I'm a reporter and I'm curious and I want to find things out. But if you want to be provocative and you want people to react and read your column, you have to have a point of view." She laughs harder when I ask, "How's your sex life?" She's opened herself up to this with an anecdote about once asking the same question of a political dissident who'd spent most of his adult life in solitary confinement. "Don't have kids," she barks gregariously, revealing perhaps another shade of Maoism. Ironically, argues Wong, it's the Chinese government's policy of discouraging reproduction that will probably do the most to dismantle communism. The new generation of children from one-child families will be too self-centered to be controlled by society. "If you don't have that consciousness of individuality, you can't even get to first base in a democracy. You need that sense of the individual, which is what China is developing--though not consciously--through the one-child policy. You may end up with a selfish middle class, but the middle class is very important to the development of democracy. Of course, it could go the other way. Nothing's for sure." But clearly, she's optimistic.
Jan Wong's China: Reports From a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent by Jan Wong, Doubleday Canada, hc, 331pp, $32.99 |
There are a lot of sides to Jan Wong and many of them prefer Canada to China. Such as: the 47-year-old mother of two boys who is currently renovating her bathroom and marvelling over how many shades of white there are; the 1970 Loyola College freshette princess and daughter of Décarie strip-buffet baron Bill Wong; and finally the ex-Maoist who enrolled in Beijing University in 1972 and then became bitterly disillusioned with Chinese communism.