A Conversation With Yuan-tsung Author of Middle Kingdom
Norm Goldman
June 30, 2008
Yuan-tsung Chen, in Chinese, means the First Pearl of the Chen family and Chen is her maiden name too. Chen's family and the family of Jack, her late husband, share a very common Chinese surname.
Yuan-tsung Chen was born in Shanghai and she was raised in a middle-class family, educated mainly in American missionary schools and grew up in a cosmopolitan city.
She worked most of the time in Beijing´s Film Publishing House as an editor and translator before coming to USA in 1972.
Chen, since the age of thirteen, always dreamed of becoming a writer and writing something that could make a difference. This was not only her wish to express herself, to communicate with others, to use the abilities she felt were inside her, but also fulfilling the traditional Chinese sense of social responsibility of a writer that one should express the truth as one sees it and understands it.
Good day YT and thanks for participating in our interview:
Norm:
Could you briefly tell our readers something about your book Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China and what motivated you to write the book?
YT:
When I started the research, I sought to trace the three generations of men in the Chen family. Ah Chen, a landless peasant, fought in the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864; inspired by Christian ideas, he strove with his comrades to establish God´s Kingdom on Earth.
Eugene Chen, Ah Chen´s eldest son, worked as a close aide to Sun Yatsen, who led the 1911 Revolution overthrowing the last dynasty; Eugene Chen played a leading role in preserving the Republic of China.
Jack Chen, Eugene´s younger son (and my late husband), through his art and journalism, represented and explained the Chinese Marxist Revolution to the outside world; by countering Chiang Kaishek´s propaganda in the world´s media, Jack helped Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (prime minister, 1949-1976, Mao´s chief partner and also opponent) defeat Chiang and create the People´s Republic of China.
What they did and the adventures they had fascinated me. I asked myself why didn´t I blend their biographies into the great events of their times? Then I would have an epic story in the making: China´s rebirth as a nation in modern times through recounting the story of one Chinese family confronted by history. The idea excited me and inflamed my imagination.
The idea of writing this book germinated during the Cultural Revolution. Despite its attractive name, the Cultural Revolution was a violent purge that lasted 10 years – from 1966 to 1976. It was Mao Zedong´s version of the Great Terror Stalin had launched in the 1930s.
One of the things Mao was determined to do was to destroy history. The Red Guards, who were his hit men, searched public and private libraries and archives, burned many books and documents, and generally cleared the way for Mao to promote his version of events. I never forget the day on which the Red Guard broke into our apartment, taking away many books and papers. Their ringleader said to us coldly that those were evidences exposing the crimes of the three Chen men had committed against the revolution. That really put my back up.
Both Jack and I treasured our family heritage and we wanted to save as much as we could of what we knew about China´s struggle for independence during the last century and a half. That determination started us on a long, tortuous, bumpy road.
Norm:
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
YT:
To find out who the three Chen men were, and then find each of their place in the big picture. If I thought that I was able, by so doing, to let the readers see them as real people, real human beings, warts and all, whom the readers can identify with, then I enjoyed very much doing so.
Let me elaborate a bit, and start on the first revolutionary of the Chen family, Ah Chen. I enjoyed most writing about his speedy transformation from an aimless drifter to a fighter with a purpose. That was remarkable. Before he joined the Taiping rebels, he was roaming around the poverty-stricken countryside and trying to find some odd jobs, so as to keep himself from dying of hunger. He must have had the qualities requisite for such quick promotion, and he also must have known how to strut his stuff. He was a foot soldier and later a lower-ranking officer. For years I had no clue to what he had achieved as a warrior, and yet finding this part of his life was essential to creating him as a three-dimensioned character. The task was very difficult. He was not important to history.
To find him in the big picture was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I almost gave up, and then by sheer luck I picked up a torn, old, yellowing page in my basement. It was the first page of an article about Eugene in which the author mentioned Ah Chen.
Fortunately the author´s name and the magazine´s name were still discernable. I dashed to UC Berkeley´s library and ferreted out the magazine and copied the whole article. As I read on, my anxiety turned to joy. The article credited Ah Chen for having done important work in the drive to conquer the strategically important Wuhan area. I congratulated myself on discovering this piece of information, and now I could paint a fuller portrait of Ah Chen.
Now let me come to the second revolutionary of my family, Eugene Chen. He was born in 1878 in Trinidad, then a British colony, where Ah Chen had immigrated after the Taiping Rebellion had been crushed by the Manchu Court of the last Dynasty, in collaboration with the Western Powers.
Eugene finished his education on scholarship and became a successful lawyer. In his mid-thirties, he moved his family to London´s St. John´s Wood. It was a quiet, genteel, upper-middle-class neighborhood. Not satisfied with material comforts, he wanted to search for a life with higher purpose; he wanted to go to his homeland to fight for an independent China. When his wife, Aisy, at Liverpool Street Station, watched him boarding the Trans-Siberian Express to the unknown world of Peking, she felt as if he was sinking into a dark, bottomless void. She, a French Creole, knew very little about China, and so did he. Eugene did not speak a word of Chinese, nor did he know anyone in China. All he took with him was the remarkable courage.
From that moment on Eugene started a journey of incredible adventure. He plunged into the maelstrom of Chinese politics. He battled powerful warlords, and was put on the death row twice, and once made a narrow escape from the firing squad at the last minute. But of all his adventures, I enjoyed most writing about was his taking on President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Wilson had made a secret pact with Japan, popularly known as Lansing-Ishii agreement, agreeing to transfer the defeated Germany´s colonial interests in China´s Shandong Province to Japan. China was to be sacrificed, but Eugene would not let that happen. This was a real-life story of David versus Goliath! While writing it, I felt the elation of spirit.
I also enjoyed very much writing about the romance of Eugene and Soong Chingling, widow of Sun Yatsen who was the father of the republic, the Chinese version of George Washington. In 1926 after both of them had lost their respective spouses, Eugene and Chingling fell in love. 1926 was the year before the collapse of the revolutionary government, and the storm was brewing.
Their romance was blossoming under the darkening sky, with black clouds rolling ominously. Then in July 1927 the United Front of the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) and the Communist Party split. Trying to resuscitate the United Front, Eugene and Chingling went to Moscow together. It is true that they went on a revolution mission, but the mission would also decide their personal fate as well.
It was during Eugene´s last talk with Stalin that he suddenly realized how the dictator intended to appease Chiang Kaishek, the man most responsible for breaking up the United Front, and wanted to use him and Chingling in a most demeaning manner. Inflamed by national pride and chivalrous sentiment, Eugene told Stalin firmly, frankly that he would not be his man in Chiang Kaishek´s Nanjing government. While writing this episode, I felt like narrating an ancient Greek tragedy, feeling my pain being transmuted into exaltation.
One book I enjoy reading enormously is Cervantes´ DON QUIXOTE. Jack was my Don Quixote. For a while I entertained the idea of fictionalizing his life and wrote a different, separate book. Then as I got deeper into my research, I found that there was no need to do so. The facts about his life were stranger than fiction. In serving the revolution, he roamed through nearly all the major metropolises in this world: London, Shanghai, Peking, Moscow, Petersburg, Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, and so on. And yet his involvement in the Chinese revolution was accidental.
After his mother´s death in 1926, he went from London to Wuhan to join his father, Eugene, who was then the foreign minister, the spokesman, and the "brain" of Wuhan´s coalition government of which the Chinese Communist Party was a part. In 1926, the right-wing generals hadn´t arrested communists on a large scale, but the harassment began. Jack ran into Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (later prime minister from1949-1976) when they were on the firing line. Jack, a devout Roman Catholic, out of Christian charity, sheltered the two atheists. The three young men became friends, thus began Jack´s journey of adventure.
I must make a little confession: Of all Jack´s adventures, I enjoyed most writing was the one in the Cultural Revolution, the violent purge launched by Mao Zedong. By the second year of the purge (1967), the Red Guards had kept Jack under surveillance. He was cut off, with no recourse to get help, and left to his own devices.
But Jack did not despair. Because he had me as his female Sancho Panza, he was able to continue to tilt at evil windmills. He mapped out, with some input from me, a plan to fight back. As the only foot soldier under his command, I did all the things that he could not do, not only because of the restrictions imposed on his movement but also because of the language barrier. Jack spoke very little Chinese. Most important, I went around scouting for information which helped
Jack know when to do what. I smuggled out his letters, so he could keep in touch with Zhou Enlai who intervened several times in Jack´s behalf, warding off the Red Guards, though only temporarily. And even with Red Guards circling around me, I outmaneuvered them and got to meet with the prime minister at a decisive moment that would finally get us off the Red Guards´ death row.
But every truce allowed us to take our breath back, and recharged, we went into the arena again. So did the Red Guards. In 1969 they exiled us to a rural village in a back country, and, in effect, buried us alive there. We countered with a bold stroke. I managed to sneak a letter past the Red Guards and it reached Jack´s American brother-in-law, Jay Leyda, in Canada. While the Red Guards thought they had already finished Jack off, he was getting ready right under their nose for a lecture tour in the USA, which Jay Leyda was arranging for him. Because I actually shared this stage of Jack´s life, I think this is one of the most vivid chapters.
Norm:
Where did you get your information and ideas for your book?
YT:
In the beginning I got the information and ideas during the Cultural Revolution. Jack, whom I had met in early 1950s and married in 1958, was not a name- dropper. He seldom talked about his illustrious father or his own friendship with political leader such as Zhou Enlai. But this changed in 1966 with the onset of the purge. Jack, who worked in the Foreign Languages Bureau as expert (in English language matters), advisor and editor, became the prime target in the whole bureau for several reasons.
For one, Jack was more Westernized than anyone in his office and therefore more suspicious in the eyes of the Red Guards. Because he spoke very little Chinese, Jack insisted that I accompany him when he was interrogated. Only then did he begin to tell me about his family history. What he told me formed the embryo for this book.
When we arrived in America – Jack in 1971 and I in 1972 – we continued our research, using libraries on various university campuses, thus getting the opportunity to read what had been forbidden in China. This was helpful. Then more help came from materials published in China in the mid-80s and -90s when intellectual policy was gradually relaxed. Then I learned something very exciting. Some historians, who had had easy access to the Communist Party archives in the mainland, were allowed to move to Hong Kong and write and publish what was called "Lost and found" history. Then historians, residing in the mainland, were allowed to write history books critical of Mao Zedong and other former top leaders, which, however, were only allowed to be published in Hong Kong. I made several trips to Hong Kong and the mainland, buying those books which filled my small library.
Norm:
In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?
YT:
This book that I have written is non-fiction. I take some, what I call logical liberties, to bring out the inherent drama in a fact. Here is an example: The role Eugene played in the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference which I mention in one of the above answers. He went to Paris with two missions. One, to attend the Conference. Two, to get into direct contact with the Soviets. He took with him a letter from Sun Yatsen to Lenin, sounding the Russian leader out if there was any possibility of cooperation. In Paris he met few Russians who gave him a copy of the secret Lansing-Ishii agreement which the Soviets had discovered in the czar´s secret file after the 1917 Revolution.
This is flat narrative. To make it more interesting, I need details and anecdotes and the description of the place. Jack provided the details and anecdotes, for example, he told me that the two cities Eugene loved most were Peking and Paris. The City of Light, according to Eugene, was lit by Prometheus himself. From this remark I learned that Eugene loved Greek mythology as I do. Then I must tackle the task of describing the place, which, in my view, is very important. It brings immediacy and intimacy. So I went to Paris on a research/pleasure trip.
I stayed in a small hotel, and took a bus to reach my destination. When I walked in the halls of the Versailles Palace, I could not help trembling with awe, as the grandeur overwhelmed me. Now let me cite the passages I write after the trip.
"He [Eugene] opened the window and gazed at the city, which had an air, a character, an aura that enchanted him. There was a unique light bathing the whole city, softening its lines. It even made magic out of some not-too-attractive streets, lanes, and corners. Eugene wondered if this was one reason why Paris was called the City of Light.
"Somewhere beyond the rooftops and treetops was Versailles, the most grandiose palace in the Western World. Versailles was the Olympus of its time, and at the moment the gods were holding court there and deciding the fate of nations. He, Eugene Chen, was going to steal their thunder, to undo what they had done, to turn their Holy Mount upside down. At this unbelievably bold thought, a shudder of excitement, akin to fear, crept down his spine."
Norm:
What are the preponderant influences on your writing? As a follow up, has your environment and/or upbringing influenced your writing? If so, please explain.
YT:
When I was a small child, about 6 years old, the room I liked most in our house was my father´s study. It was filled with books. A lot of classics, Chinese and English, were put in shelves made of sandalwood with sliding doors. I liked to read whether I understood or not. I can claim that I came from a family with the sweet scent of books, so to speak.
Scholarship impressed me. If there was an aristocracy in China, it was not one of blood, but of scholarship. There is an old saying that when a politician or a military man succeeds, he is king; when he is crushed, he is bandit. But books are forever. Scholars (or educated persons) were, traditionally, in the Confucian order of things, at the top of the social hierarchy, just one step below the emperor, and the emperor was the august Son of Heaven. Noblesse oblige demanded that scholars use their knowledge to serve the people. The highest achievement of an educated person was to know the joys and sorrows, and voice the needs and aspirations of the less fortunate, to articulate their feelings and thoughts.
Later in schools, the teaching enhanced this belief in me. I believe that a writer should take his social responsibility seriously, and his writing should not only to entertain readers, but also give some food for thought. It was not an accident that my first book, THE DRAGON´S VILLAGE, deals with the land reform that was supposed to give the poor and landless peasants a better tomorrow. The better tomorrow did come, but the day after, Mao Zedong collectivized all the land. The peasants became landless again.
I wrote this new book, RETURN TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, in the same spirit. The three Chen men had been gone and therefore voiceless, and it was my family obligation to tell their stories, and it was also my duty of a survivor to tell the stories of the less fortunate who had perished in the numerous political and social upheavals. So I blended biographies with history.
Norm:
Why do you feel that this was an important book for you to write and for all of us to read at this time?
YT:
My book is personalized history, but it has ties to the present day. It covers a period in which China began its troubled relations with the West, in particular, the United States, and it ends where there was hope of the two reconciling. I present the book at a time when the United States, now more than ever, needs to build a relationship with China in areas where the two countries share common interests. China is probably the only serious contender for world power that the US faces today and for the foreseeable future. I think that there is no bigger story in the 21st century than the one dealing with how the two giants interact.
But I must speak honestly, frankly, that we don´t really know how to interact with our biggest competitor, because we don´t really know China and its people. For example, the interruption of the 2008 Olympic torch relay, in our eyes, it is a showcase of the Chinese government. Yes, it is a showcase of the Chinese government, but it is also more than that. It is the coming-out party for the
Chinese people, who has been labeled as "the Dying Man of East" not long ago. In most Chinese´s eyes, the torch relay interruption is encouraged by the same Western countries who, not long ago called them "the Dying Man of East" and wished them drop dead, so the colonialists could permanently keep them on their bended knees.
Then what happens next? The Chinese are so roused by a surge of nationalism that they react fiercely. This sort of interaction is dangerous, and its consequence is unthinkable.
Reading my book, the readers will understand why the Chinese, communist or non-communist, react that way.
Norm:
What challenges or obstacles did you encounter while writing your book? How did you overcome these challenges?
YT:
The language. English is my second language. I speak and read English pretty well and it seems that it would be a simple thing to learn how to write it. But in practice it does not work out that way.
It is one thing to talk and read, another to write. When I talk, I merely present my ideas as they come to me, not in the order required for a written composition, and to speak informally I do not have to be exact in choosing the words I want. But once I turn to my writing, I come under another discipline.
Now I have to select very carefully the words I need in order to paint a picture for my readers to see. And that is when my headache begins. At that moment, an invisible troublemaker drives a wedge in my brain and splits it into two parts. While one part is busy looking for the appropriate English words and expressions to translate my Chinese ideas, the other part is busy pointing out the awkwardness, or rather the un-English of my Chinese mind. At once there is tumult and confusion. The one part of my brain is trying to build a structure in English, word by word, phrase by phrase, while the other part is blue-pencilling those words, transferring sentences, and rearranging phrases. There is a communications breakdown; the switchboard is overloaded.
How did I overcome these challenges? Keep reading English. I read much, much more English writing than Chinese. But I did not overcome these challenges all the time. Sometimes I did if I was lucky.
Norm:
Who are your favorite authors, and why do they inspire you?
YT:
I am a book lover, and I have many, many favourite authors. Not to bore you, I´ll choose a few.
Turgenev, his love stories are heartbreakingly beautiful. His HOME OF THE GENTRY is the most beautiful love story I have ever read. Love is such a wonderfully impossible thing that I once considered to enter a convent, following the heroine´s footsteps. I write about love in my books, though never idealistically as Turgenev does. But I am shy of calling lust love. His influence.
Dostoevsky, he sublimates suffering and makes me believe that suffering will make a better person of me. During the most violent of Mao Zedong´s purges, the Cultural Revolution, one night Jack found me reading THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and asked me why. My reply was to get ready to follow him into exile. I write about suffering in my books, but the sufferers endure with dignity.
Balzac, he writes about greed, lust, and malice with a sense of comedy. His novels don´t leave me cold after reading about his unsavoury characters, but with a smile. I learned from Balzac to give the devil his due, so I am not mean to the unsavoury characters in my books
George Eliot, she once wanted to be a saint. Who struggles most constantly and passionately with his own demon? A saint or an aspiring saint. The dark impulses, which Eliot´s heroines try to suppress, are felt in me. Their efforts appeal to me, as a woman and as a writer. None of my characters is spared from, at least, a fleeting dark impulse.
Plutarch, his PARALLEL LIVES of eminent Greeks and Romans greatly influences me.
I learned from this classic Greek/Roman historian how to use revealing anecdotes to enliven the narrative, and how to use relevant details to illuminate great events.
Norm:
Over the past several years there has been a proliferation of books, fiction and non-fiction pertaining to China. Why do you believe that this has happened?
YT:
As I mention in one of the above replies, China is probably the only serious contender for world power that the United States faces today and for the foreseeable future. People here want to know it and its people.
As Eugene said in my book, the Chinese people and civilization "had witnessed the rise and fall of empires in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates…" Where are those empires? But in a sense the Chinese Empire is still alive and kicking.
Every time I visited or recall what I have seen in China, even I, born and raised and living for the first half of my life in China, felt fascinated. In Beijing, Xian or Hangzhou, there are the skyscrapers, the boldly sweeping freeways, the brilliant shopping malls. They are the new things, built about thirty or twenty or ten years or even fewer years ago, but the backdrop, the environment in which they are set, is ages old. Ancient walls, pagodas, canals, gardens. A pool of water shrunken to the size of a tiny pond, which is no bigger than a hot tub in someone´s backyard, might be all that remained of a lovely lake that once reflected an imperial palace and its soaring roofs.
A crumbled line of clay and stones might be the last remaining trace of a mighty wall that had stretched a thousand miles. A small town of bricks and wood and grey tiles with cobbled streets, now famous only for the size of its chicken eggs, still carries the name of the capital of a once proud kingdom of thirty centuries ago.
Walking in the fields outside its walls, I might chance on a shard of pottery older than that. Few nations have that kind of continuity. Even fewer can say that their boundaries are hardly less than they have ever been. But China carries the weight of these centuries lightly and speaks of the distant past as easily as it does of yesterday.
How can China not stir up readers´ curiosity? Naturally they would like to find out why and how. Well, again in my book Eugene said: "The Chinese people had reversed the teachings of forty centuries and were dedicating themselves to the mighty work of adapting their civilization…to the aims and needs of the new republic." Perhaps there is some clue there.
Norm:
When I last checked where readers of Bookpleasures.com were from, I noticed to my surprise that we received considerable traffic from China. Would you care to comment on this phenomenon?
YT:
Since China was defeated, by Britain, in the Opium War in the 1840s, the far-sighted men knew that China must learn from the West. An enormous volume of Western books in literature, drama, art, politics, military training, industry, science, philosophy, sports and so on, were translated into Chinese. They were absorbed and became part of the "New Learning". The "New Learning" had a great impact on the educated men and women since the last half of the 19th century and became, more or less, part of their mental makeup.
The interest in the West was always there, even Mao Zedong could not stifle it. In 1958, he launched a campaign to wipe out the decadent Western influence. But the moderates in his own Party went on subsidizing the translators and publishing the "poisonous weeds".
One day several bookstores in Beijing announced that an anthology of short stories, written by Maupassant, Chekhov, Maugham, O´Henry, etc, was for sale. I went to the nearest store and stood patiently in a long, long queue. Over our heads and above the lintel of the bookstore´s gate, a microphone blasted those morally corrupt imperialist-agents in disguise as writers, spreading anti-communist propaganda. But to no avail. Within days, more than a million copies were sold. I am not surprised that you received considerable traffic from China.
Norm:
Are you working on any books/projects that you would like to share with us? (We would love to hear all about them!)
YT:
Yes, I am planning to write a story of a woman, who has survived semi-colonialism, military despotism (Chiang Kaishek regime), socialism, communism, and up to this moment, somehow managed to keep her mouth above water in the nerve center of capitalism. What do you think of it? Interesting?
Norm:
Where can our readers find out more about you and your book and is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?
YT:
I have a WEBSITE which is linked with Barnes & Noble´s website; please visit them, and you´ll find a lot about me and my book. Barnes & Noble is the corporate parent of my publisher, the Union Square Press of Sterling Publishing. Walk into a B&N bookstore, you´ll see the display of my book. Amazon and some other bookstores, which you can search and find in the Internet, are selling it too.
Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.
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