There are those moments when you feel the weight of history pressing on you — that awestruck realization that a great moment happened here, and now you’re bearing witness. Maybe you’ve ducked into a tower while on the Great Wall. Or you’re standing just inside the Lincoln Memorial. The thing is, I never expected to have that feeling while standing in my basement, squinting up at an unidentified roll of film. But that’s what happened to me last Sunday, as I was searching through an old shoebox from my parents labeled “photos.”

I found a black film canister at the bottom of the box, the kind that stores unused film rolls. But what I pulled out of that canister, protected by a small twist of tissue paper, was instead a tightly wrapped roll of already processed negatives. Holding them up to the light, I saw… what looked like black-and-white negatives of Tiananmen Square. With some kind of giant white figure holding what could be a torch. And that’s when I felt it. The history.

I had no idea why or how my parents had these pictures. They had never said anything about them. But I had to find out what they were, so I went to get them printed. I came back with two sets of photos, one from a march to Tiananmen Square, and one from the short period of time when the Goddess of Democracy rose over the crowds. I believe the photos were from my uncle, who was an art student in Beijing in 1989. I didn’t know that he had taken pictures, or that he had somehow gotten those pictures to my parents, who were already in America.

There’s so much to see in these photos. Every time I look at them, I spot something new. People laughing in the background. Balloons in the air. A surprising number of little kids around the square. Many of the articles I’ve read on the 25th anniversary of June 4th talk about memory, whether Chinese people choose to remember or forget. In one of my uncle’s photos, a sign on the Monument to the People’s Heroes says, “The People Will Not Forget 1989.” So let’s look, and remember.

For more of these photos, visit The China Girls.

Photo: Catherine Henriette, AFP/Getty Images, via USA Today

Mme Chiang Kai-Shek, Ernest Hemingway, and Martha Gellhorn in Chongqing (Chungking) in 1941

Peter Harmsen of the excellent China in WW2 blog has a great write-up of Ernest Hemingway and his then-wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, traveling to Chongqing in 1941. You may have heard this story before — the couple’s distaste of the country and Hemingway’s dabbling in espionage, among other things – but there are a few anecdotes I’d like to highlight from Harmsen’s piece, titled “For Whom the Gongs Toll.”

First, there was a meeting with Song Meiling, i.e. “The Empress of China,” as Hemingway himself put it (as recalled in Gellhorn’s memoir, Travels With Myself and Another):

Hemingway hit it off with Mme Chiang, but then Gellhorn raised the issue of lepers roaming the streets of China, forced to beg for a living. The Chinese First Lady exploded in anger. The Chinese were humane, she said, and unlike westerners they would never lock lepers up in isolation from other people. “China,” Mme Chiang said in conclusion, “had a great culture when your ancestors were living in trees and painting themselves blue.”

What ancestors, Gellhorn thought to herself, apes or ancient Britons? The encounter wound up with a somewhat strained attempt to part on amicable terms. Mme Chiang offered a peasant’s straw hat and a jade brooch to the famous couple. Gellhorn liked the hat but thought the brooch was “tacky” and was not appeased. Hemingway was amused. “I guess that’ll teach you to take on the Empress of China,” he told his wife with a laugh tainted by Schadenfreude.

The schadenfreude was because Hemingway suspected he’d have an unpleasant time in the Far East, and he wanted to make sure his wife heard him express, “I told you so.”

The following is a far more amusing anecdote though: Hemingway was a champion drinker, likely of baijiu (what else were they going to give him?):

For Hemingway himself, one of the highlights of the trip was a “booze battle” – the famous American drinker against 14 Chinese officers taking turns doing bottoms up. “Slowly officers grew scarlet in the face and slid beneath the table; others went green-white and fell as if shot,” Gellhorn reminisced. Hemingway, by contrast, “was planted on his feet like Atlas.”

And one more quickie: premier Zhou Enlai was apparently a straight-up charmer. From Gellhorn’s memoir via Harmsen:

Gellhorn even had a crush on Zhou worthy of a teenage girl: “I was so captivated by this entrancing man that if he said, take my hand and I will lead you to the pleasure dome of Xanadu, I would have made sure that Xanadu wasn’t in China, asked for a minute to pick up my toothbrush, and been ready to leave.”

Go read the whole thing. For more on Hemingway and Gellhorn, there’s a movie called Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman.

For Whom the Gongs Toll (China in WW2)

In college, I came across the original diaries of two Fuzhou missionaries that had been gathering dust in our library for more than 100 years. I’ve now lived in China for four years, which seems like long enough to revisit the stories of Mary Allen and Carlos Martin.

Many of us expats view ourselves as arbiters of cross-cultural exchanges and vanguards of Chinese knowledge unto the Western world. We’ve learned chengyu, written papers, blogged, photographed, dated Chinese people, opened bars, been screwed out of our money on multiple occasions, chalked up so, so much to “learning experiences.” But for a real look at how deep the rabbit hole goes, look before 1978, and especially before 1949. The absurdity of living a cross-/multicultural life in China is like a rock swept under rising waters; now, we only see the tip of it.

In August 1859, Mary Allen (20) and Carlos Martin (24) married at an Episcopal Church in rural Vermont. Within two months, the town waved its handkerchiefs as the young couple set sail for Fuzhou. After several months of acute seasickness and dolphin-spotting, the Martins were greeted by a band of Protestant missionaries that had rooted in Fuzhou a decade earlier. The Martins settled in; Carl proselytized while Mary bore children. They became members of the community, even befriending Chinese. Then, on January 17, 1864, the town stormed their cottage, demanding blood.

It’s easy to forget in this modern age of Foreign Babes in Beijing and Shanghai Calling, but China once experienced exhilarating schadenfreude in regards to the outside world (literally 国外), and outsiders who came to China lived a life of both privilege and perdition beyond what we now witness in Xintiandi and Sanlitun. Indeed, Mary Martin returned to Vermont after five years in Fuzhou having lost both her husband and infant son.

The Martins were devoted and enthusiastic offspring of the Protestant intellectual movement of the mid-19th century, wherein a middle-class self-evaluation proffered that overseas proselytizing was an undertaking of the highest moral caliber. Once in China, most of these missionaries realized that giving soapbox sermons in the broken local dialect was as effective as having stayed in Vermont. Nonetheless, they set up rice kitchens, orphanages, and hospitals. Slowly, the conversions came.

Still, great barriers rose to oppose them. The Opium Wars had made Chinese feel like second-class citizens in their own land, and paternalistic Confucianism remained ensconced in the aristocracy, as the privileged and influential were the least likely to change their beliefs. The threat posed by the “outside world,” in particular in the form of religion, was a sharp jab to the intellectual and aristocratic classes. “Protecting” and “defending” tradition were (and often still are) conflated with targeting and marginalizing anything foreign.

In the widely read Pixie Jishi (“A record of facts to ward off heterodoxy,” 闢邪紀事), written by an anonymous “Most Heartbroken Man in the World” (in reference to the Opium Wars) in 1861, the author indulges Chinese suspicions of Christians as sexual perverts and churches as loci of orgies. He writes:

During the first three months of life the anuses of all [Christian] infants – male and female – are plugged up with a small hollow tube…It causes the anus to dilate so that upon growing up sodomy will be facilitated. At the junction of each spring and summer boys procure the menstrual discharge of women and, smearing it on their faces, go into Christian churches to worship. They call this ‘cleansing one’s face before paying one’s respects to the holy one, and regard it as one of the most venerative rituals by which the Lord can be worshiped.  Fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers, behave licentiously with one another, calling it ‘the joining of the vital forces.’ … Hard as it may be to believe, some of our Chinese people also follow their religion. Are they not really worse than beasts?

Simmering suspicion – and certainly superstition – would have contributed to the gathering of a curious crowd outside the new church in East Fuzhou on January 17, 1864. Carl Martin and his fellow Chinese preacher Xu Yangmei had been preparing the new congregation house for months. As Christians, both Chinese and foreign, shuffled into the new building, unassociated onlookers pushed in as well. They played with the wall ornaments and hung around in the pulpit. When asked to leave, they grew indignant and suspicious. Some face must have been lost in the exchange. A few left and came back with a larger crowd, and actions occurred that today would be front-page news on The New York Times.

Xu Yangmei’s wife and daughters were beaten and raped in the new church, along with other Chinese Christians. Either the foreign members had escaped or were not put on record as having been assaulted at that time; Mary, Carl, and their two sons hurried home and collected their items, literally chased out the back door and into the woods by the mob. They escaped.

The idea of a “harmonious society” – in this case, glossing over punishments and repayments for the sake of maintaining family face and community stability – is by no means the handicapped child of China’s communist regime. The idea arguably originates in Confucian texts, and was certainly pertinent in Fuzhou at the time. The local officials demanded that the lead rioters and rapists apologize to Xu Yangmei, which they did. Face for face, and the incident fell by the wayside.

Carl and his newborn son died of cholera later that year.

Allegedly – I have never gone – the church still remains in East Fuzhou, tended by a direct descendent of Xu Yangmei. One of Carl and Mary’s direct descendants sought him out in the 1990s and was warmly received in that very church.

Paul French once said in an interview, “The laowai experience is a collective one. Everyone needs to stop thinking of their own stories as special.” Looking back on this incident in Fuzhou in 1864, I can’t agree more. And the more I discover incidents such as this, the more I want to shut up about my own experiences. There’s such a rich history that we may all benefit from giving our predecessors a longer listen.

Hannah Lincoln currently lives in Beijing. Her previous pieces for BJC include this airplane story about false assumptions, misunderstanding, and forgiveness.

UPDATE, 6/4/14: We’ve swapped out the video because it’s no longer available per the original source. Above, the full documentary with Chinese subtitles.

If you haven’t already, watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, with writing by Geremie Barmé and John Crowley. The three-hour documentary was released in 1995 to rave reviews — “the atmosphere of the Beijing Spring is conveyed beautifully in all its pathos, drama, hope, craziness, poetry, and violence,” wrote Ian Buruma; “a hard-headed critical analysis of a youthful protest movement that failed,” wrote The New York Times – and remains the best film ever made about the June Fourth Incident. Instead of glorifying the student leaders or condemning the Communist Party, it explains how a peaceful democracy movement could possibly have resulted in martial law and Chinese troops opening fire on their own citizens, and attempts to sift through propaganda to produce a chronicle — within the context of Chinese, not Western, history – that might stand the test of time. Absolutely moving, riveting, and powerful beyond words.

If you’ve already seen it, watch it again.

Part 1 is above; here’s part 2 The deleted videos we’ll leave here in case the original uploader brings them back:

If you haven’t read Murong Xuecun’s piece about China’s Great Famine revisionists — those who doubt even the textbook figure that around 15 million people died prematurely from 1959-62 due to hunger — start here.

Two other stories on this subject are also worth your attention. Foreign Policy, which ran Murong’s declamation, has a slideshow of propaganda posters and slogans that were published in China during the Great Famine. We sample a few images below.

And Tania Branigan of the Guardian has just profiled Yang Jisheng, author of Tombstone, which documents the Great Famine from a ground-level perspective. (Jonathan Mirsky reviewed the book for the New York Times last month.) Yang, whose father died of starvation, tells the Guardian:

He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: “I didn’t think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn’t know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn’t know about farmers who were beaten to death.

“People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible.”

At the very least, the article serves as a necessary counterpoint to Murong’s claim that “for the past six decades, the Chinese people have been living in an obscurantist system that is designed to make people stupid, foster mutual hatred, and degrade their ability to think critically and understand the world.” There are plenty of people willing to think critically and talk about the past:

Paradoxically, it was his work for Xinhua that enabled him to unearth the truth about the famine, as he toured archives on the pretext of a dull project on state agricultural policies, armed with official letters of introduction.

Numerous people helped him along the way; local officials and other Xinhua staff. Did they realise what he was working on? “Yes, they knew,” he says.

Let Them Eat Grass (Murong Xuecun, Foreign Policy)
Propaganda from China’s Great Famine (Foreign Policy)
China’s Great Famine: the true story (The Guardian)

The article, “Let Them Eat Grass,” is ostensibly about China’s Great Famine revisionists — of which there are apparently plenty — but Murong merely peppers those folk with jabs and body shots –

Remarkably, the focus of contention is not the cause of the famine, but whether it actually occurred. Many believe a small number of ill-intentioned conspirators fabricated the famine. Some see it as short-lived, restricted to a small area, and think that it was absolutely impossible for tens of millions to have starved to death. One netizen, who went by the name Fact Checker, asked, “If so many people starved to death, where are the mass graves?” Wu Danhong, an associate professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing and a prominent leftist, wrote on Sina Weibo: “I have verified that between 1959 and 1961 in my profoundly impoverished hometown there were instances of people consuming tree bark and some were so hungry they contemplated suicide. But they endured and no one died of starvation. The entire village suffered from diseases of hunger but none died. Perhaps some political rightist whose circumstances were bad to begin with starved to death.”

Professor Wu’s comments inspired many others, including the baffled (“My hometown is poor, so why haven’t I heard about people starving to death?”) and the caustic (“If so many people starved to death, why didn’t your mother?”). Someone who went by the name Li Weiling wrote: “I’ve seen a lot of articles written by people who were sent down to labor in rural villages in the 1960s which claim they had to survive on water and locusts and the result was edema. I really don’t understand why they didn’t plant vegetables and grains. They were sent down to the countryside to labor, weren’t they?” Li inspired another comment from someone who went by the name smallcat823: “If there was no grain, why didn’t they eat wild herbs? I hear wild herbs are delicious.”

– before laying the big right hook:

Most people in China suffer from an inability-to-accept-facts syndrome. They only believe what they want to believe and can’t see facts that are painful or contradict their own views. A school curriculum that ignores all policy failures since 1949 exacerbates this syndrome.

“This syndrome is the source of many conflicts in contemporary China,” he writes. We’d be remiss to not mention that the syndrome is by no means exclusive to this country — I grew up in a state that tried to take evolution off the high school state curriculum twice — but institutionalized amnesia here appears worse if only because the stakes seem higher. The history is more recent, larger in scale, more traumatic, and simultaneously, the younger generation is more divergent, many of them with no interest in the burdens of the past, or what we might call “social memory.”

So as a society, how do we move on? Dredge up more materialistic mortar as stopgap until those who still remember are dead — and along with them, the forgettable past? These are the difficult questions that have always confronted China. They spend most of the time unseen, tugged with the undertow, but will, like an unpleasant reminder or its morbid physical commensurate, occasionally bob toward the surface, bloated and grotesque, waiting for someone brave enough to pull it ashore.

The NY Times’s photography blog, Lens, has just published 20 stunning pictures from the Cultural Revolution, a “panoramic view” that includes Little Red Books, an execution, and an elongated dunce cap. The images were taken by Harbin photojournalist Li Zhensheng, “perhaps the most complete and nuanced pictorial account of the decade of turmoil ignited by Mao Zedong,” says NYT.

That is where he did his life’s work documenting the Cultural Revolution, taking the “positive” propaganda images of masses whipped up in revolutionary fervor for the newspaper, and also the “negative,” more nuanced, questioning pictures. He snipped those frames off his film and hid them under the parquet floorboards of his house until the revolution ended. He did not show these pictures in China until the late 1980s. Even today, given the sensitivities that linger over the Cultural Revolution in China, his work is more often seen overseas rather than at home.

Li, 72, has a book of works called Red-Color News Soldier, and he’ll be part of a major photo exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery starting on September 13. We’ve included a few more pictures after the jump, but do check out the complete collection on Lens. There’s also an interview with Li that adds context to the images and the era.

After Mao’s death

(H/T The Peking Duck)