Far Outliers

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to grow up in colonial Rhodesia without becoming aware from the earliest age of the deep hostility between the races. The land issue was the main bone of contention. At the age of four I would listen to my (maternal) grandfather talking about the land issue with his old friend, a Somali who owned a butchery near my grandparents’ cafe. My grandfather, Yee Wo Lee, had come to Rhodesia in 1904 as a youth of seventeen, the fifth son in a large Chinese peasant family. As the fifth son, he did not inherit any land in China. Instead he was given an education. He had gained initiation into politics as a schoolboy follower of Sun Yat-Sen, and as a result was very sensitive to the colonial situation. He was one of the first people to provide financial support for black nationalists, and his bakery, Five Roses Bakery, situated very centrally in the middle of Charter Road, and near the Railway Station (in the capital city Salisbury, now renamed Harare), soon became the meeting place for many nationalist leaders. He was later to pay the rent for ZANU….

My mother died when I was three years old, leaving my father with three young children. My father was busy running his business, and we were left in the charge of our nanny the whole day long. It was in that situation that we soon picked up a working knowledge of Shona, one of the main African languages in the country. We also came to understand our nanny, her views, her character, and background quite well as we followed her around. We knew her friends and what they talked about. It was in those early and impressionable days that I came to understand the situation in the country….

Education, or rather the lack of it, was an area that caused bitter resentment. Children were separated by race. White children attended “European” schools. Black children attended “African” schools. There was a third category of schools known as “Coloured and Asian” schools that we attended.

I attended a primary school for Asians. It was called Louis Mountbatten School, named after the British Viceroy for India, as most of the pupils were Indians. Our headmaster, Mr. V.S. Naidoo, a South African Indian from Durban, drummed into our heads from the earliest grades that since we were not whites, we would only make our way in the world through education. This message obviously fell on fertile ground, as both the teachers and pupils were exceptionally dedicated to learning. It was many years later that I learnt that it was not very usual for primary school children to be conversant with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. By the time I went to secondary school I had already covered quite a lot of the secondary school mathematics syllabus….

I was fortunate that by the time I completed primary school, the first secondary school for Coloureds and Asians, Founders’ High School, was opened in Bulawayo. Our primary school head, Mr. Naidoo, a dedicated educationalist, spent a whole day persuading my father to allow me to attend this school as a boarder as the school was in a different city, Bulawayo, four hundred miles away. My father, a conservative and traditionalist, did not really believe in educating girls, particularly in a boarding school far away from home. But Mr. Naidoo was persistent and persuasive, and my father finally relented….

At the end of my second year at Founders’, St. John’s School, a well-known Roman Catholic school for Coloureds, established a secondary section. My parents decided to transfer me to St. John’s immediately so that I would be nearer home. Moreover my father had great faith in the nuns, and believed they had special powers to improve people’s character and morality, and as he placed great value on character and morality, I had to leave the Government school for a Roman Catholic school. He was not very confident that a Government school like Founders’ would provide the right moral background.

It was at St. John’s that I came to understand the colonial set-up more intimately. St. John’s was also an “orphanage,” but the “orphans” were not really orphans. Many of them were the offspring of white men with their black mistresses. The children of such unions were usually rejected by their fathers, and sometimes also by their mothers. The totally abandoned children were raised by the Dominican sisters. They were easily identifiable as they were invariably given the names of Catholic saints such as Francis Xavier or Martin de Porres. They had developed a hard exterior, often persecuting children like myself from more privileged backgrounds. They did this by stealing our panties and our soap. Actually they were deeply sad children who knew no home other than the school, and no other family than the nuns and priests. I spent two years at that school, and it made me appreciate the privilege I enjoyed of being a spoilt child from a middle class family.

Such was the racialist consciousness that some of these children of mixed races would themselves despise and reject their black mothers. One of my most vivid childhood memories was of a black mother coming to visit her ten-year old daughter at St. John’s. As the school had very few visitors, crowds of children would usually gather round to stare at every visitor. So it was that when Hilda’s mother arrived to see her, I was one of the crowd of children who had turned out to stare at her. Ten-year old Hilda was mortified that her black mother had come to the school. This incident made me think. Hilda constantly talked of her father, a white farmer in Sinoia. She was very proud of her father who had rejected her, but she did not want to know her own mother who had come to see her. I was amazed. As a child who had grown up without a mother I found it appalling that someone would reject her own mother because of race.

I learnt at St. John’s that Coloured children placed a premium on white skin and straight hair. Many Coloured children were indistinguishable from whites, and they were envied. Many others were indistinguishable from blacks, and they were either despised or pitied. Teenage girls spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make their skins whiter and their hair straighter. Chinese girls like myself, in contrast, spent our time trying to make our hair curlier. We all had the image of the perfect beauty, who was Caucasian….

SOURCE: “Fighting for Education,” by Fay Chung, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 70-75

I remember wishing, as a hakujin kid in Japan, for straighter hair–and later, in a high school dorm named for the Duke of Gloucester, for more tannable skin.

The Spring 2004 issue of China Review International contains a review article by Ronald C. Keith entitled “History, Contradiction, and the Apotheosis of Mao Zedong” that includes the following fascinating summary of a book, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult, by Melissa Schrift (Rutgers U. Press, 2001).

In the Yan’an [or Yenan] period there were perhaps only ten badge designs, and the handmade badges of that time used Mao’s photograph and commemorative slogans. Initially badges were commemorative, celebrating the establishment of the PRC. In 1949, Mao supported a Party resolution that forbade the naming of streets, cities, or places after heroic comrades. Mao’s own portrait, however, soon reappeared on commemorative badges as early as 1951. The modest beginnings of such badges could not have prepared even the most astute observer for the spectacular production of approximately three to five billion badges during the Cultural Revolution. The badges became compulsory wear for anyone who desperately needed to authenticate his or her redness in an era of wild and arbitrary political denunciation.

Schrift tells us that along with this unprecedented volume of production there was incredible diversity of iconographic design as well [as] assertive statement of political ideals. Chen Boda’s “Four Greats” was, for example, extremely popular. Lin Biao struggled to keep his own imagery off these badges for fear that he be accused of competing with Chairman Mao, whose left profile was almost always featured on the Cultural Revolution badges. As Schrift indicates, there was a “riot of consumption” as the badges became a new form of political currency: “It was no longer enough to simply acquire and wear a badge. One’s redness depended instead on the novelty with which one could design and/or consume a badge” (Schrift, p. 111). Moreover, while badge exchanges rarely involved money, they became units of black-market barter facilitating the acquisition of goods and services.

With Mao’s attack on Lin Biao, the Party moved away from the excesses of personality cult. Badges no longer represented solid political capital. They offended a “revolutionary economism” that militated against such a tremendous waste of resources. More importantly, they could be associated with a resurgent “feudalism” within China’s supposedly revolutionary society. Even so, there were subsequent rashes of production at the time of Mao’s death and again on the centenary of his birth. In the contemporary era of market reform, pro-democracy protesters will wear Mao’s image in order to resist the current government, and this image has become “remystified” as a hot consumer item for which there is both a domestic and an international collector’s market (Schrift, p. 165).

Cool. Leftist consumerism. Or is this dialectical materialism?

Those of us who form our opinions of international leaders from the sound bites and video clips of the international media are likely to have a much higher opinion of Zhao Ziyang than of his longtime boss and mentor, Deng Xiaoping. After all, Zhao came out to sympathize with the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square shortly before Deng ordered the People’s Liberation Army to “liberate” it from them on 4 June 1989.

As a result, western media tend to give Zhao most of the credit for implementing the reforms that have now made China’s economy one of the most dynamic on earth, while downplaying the role of the now tarnished Deng. Witness the obituary headline “The death of the man who reformed China and changed the world” in the 18 January Times (of London). Wikipedia, by contrast, offers much more balanced and comprehensive portraits of Zhao and Deng.

To get another perspective on Zhao’s legacy, I called up a Chinese friend who emigrated to the U.S. in 1990, bringing his wife out the following year. He, his wife, and his U.S.-born daughter are now U.S. citizens. His father was not only a member of the CCP, but a party historian, and my friend pursued an M.A. in history at an American university after he emigrated, doing archival research on the Jiangxi Soviet of the early 1930s. He and his wife, both from intellectual families, were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

My opening question was phrased in the familiar formula many Chinese citizens used to adopt in assessing Mao’s legacy after his death: Was Zhao’s legacy 51% positive, 49% positive, or some other balance between positive and negative? My friend suggested it was 75% positive, one major black mark being Zhao’s role in persecuting intellectuals in the wake of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-57) and the ensuing disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60).

Then what about Deng, I asked. Maybe 90% positive, he replied. As we talked, he even upped it to 95%. But why so much better than Zhao? Well, Deng was the emperor; Zhao only a talented court eunuch. Deng was ultimately more responsible for the economic reforms than his underling was.

But what about the Tiananmen Incident? Looking back from 15 years later, he said, the demonstrations seem to have been less about democracy and more about frustration with corruption and with the slow pace of reform in the cities as opposed to the countryside. If that was the case, then Deng can be credited with addressing one of the principal goals of the demonstrators by extending reforms into the urban sectors. During the 1990s the cities experienced an economic boom like that the countryside had experienced during the 1980s. Now the countryside is lagging again and desperately needs a fresh infusion of infrastructure and capital.

What was Zhao trying to accomplish when he came out to meet the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square? Looking to his legacy. Like Clinton trying to secure a peace deal in the Middle East before he left office? Exactly.

P.S. Zhao’s predecessor as Deng the Reformer’s right hand was Hu Yaobang, who was perhaps even more popular with the students than Zhao was. Hu had been forced to step down in 1987, after failing to control student demonstrations in 1986. Hu’s death on 15 April 1989 helped spark the Tiananmen Square protests in May of that fateful year.

STUDY QUESTION: What proportion of the legacy of each of the following U.S. presidents was positive: Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton? All had major blots on their records. Effective leadership, unlike sainthood, is about trade-offs and all-too-human failings, not perfection and personal piety.

Passion of the Present cites a long opinion piece by Paul Mooney entitled “Beijing’s delicate balancing act in Africa” that appeared in the 17 January edition of International Herald Tribune. Here’s a short snip.

Many African nations are pleased that no political strings are attached to China’s friendship, with the obvious exception that they must not recognize Taiwan and must affirm the “one China” policy.

He Wenping, director of the African Studies Section at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, says that China and Africa share the view that countries should not meddle in each other’s affairs. “We don’t believe that human rights should stand above sovereignty,” He says. “We have a different view on this, and African countries share our view.”