EXTRA-CURRICULAR READING: FROM CHILE TO CHINA

The author in 1978.

When I was an undergraduate at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I read a great deal, unfortunately, my teachers might have said, this activity along with student politics distracted me from the main focus of a degree in classical and modern Chinese which was to master the language. As any student of Chinese would tell you that endeavour entails hour upon hour of rote learning of Chinese characters, while the reading of set texts required one’s nose to be permanently inserted between the pages of a dictionary. I’d gone to university wanting to become more clever, and more knowledgeable, and yet in the first year, I felt like I was back in primary school learning the alphabet. In reaction, I did a good deal of extra-curricular reading. And when I read, I’d read voraciously, bulimically even. The past few days I’ve been trying to recall the books, aside from books about China, that I read.
I can’t at this stage put my reading into any chronological order, but I was very interested in politics and that drew me to a literature that was eclectic but intensely interesting, and often enjoyable. Although like most of my contemporaries I was interested in the politics of China – I'd often heard my grandfather in conversation with his friends talk of Mou Chak Tung (Mao Tse-tung 毛澤東) and Cheung Kai Shek (Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石). But, I was no Maoist. What attracted me to the study of China and Chinese was my family's story and the translations of "classical" poetry I'd read as a schoolboy. In fact, my immediate interest in politics stemmed especially from the Chilean refugee community I'd come to know between high school and university. They were refugees from Pinochet's Chile who arrived in the UK in 1974. I threw myself into trying to understand the politics of Chile and its fragmented left-wing landscape. I'd already done a lot of reading about Latin America – having done Spanish to a fairly high level (A and S level if those arcane UK qualifications say anything to you) – and had been reading all the major contemporary Latin American novelists and poets. I was passionate about Pablo Neruda well before I met my Chilean friends. Amongst the poets I read were also Nicolás Guillén and José María Heredia. Amongst the novelists, apart from García Márquez whose novels and short stories opened a whole new imaginary for me, I remember being struck by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his Tres tristes tigres (three sad tigers). It was a fictional wonder world, but to understand the context, you really needed to get a grip on the politics.

Latin American contemporary literature was a far cry from the contemporary scene in China at that time. When I started learning Chinese at university, the Cultural Revolution was still ongoing, the official literature little more than crude propaganda. It would be several years before we learnt there was an underground literary scene that was waiting to be "discovered". Fortunately, as I pursued my studies, poetry in particular, I was able to maintain the link to Spanish- and particularly French-language poetry through the 1930s Chinese poets who'd taken them as models to emulate in their construction of a new vernacular modern Chinese poetry. 

Meanwhile, I continued to read modern European fiction. I also have a vivid memory reading Sartre well into the night – I often stayed up reading until 4am. It was a winter's evening and I recall it vividly because it was snowing. Pig-headedly, I insisted on reading his trilogy L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) in the original, so it took some time. I wasn't convinced by the philosophy but the historical context fascinated me. I'd read L'Étranger/The Outsider when doing French at school, and continued to read Camus. I also read all of Beckett's plays in French - they were quite accessible. And, of course, because of the China connection, I read the fabulator André Malraux's La condition humaine/Man's Estate for what it was worth.

The only English-language novelist I read extensively while an undergraduate was George Orwell; an eclectic basket of English novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, Kingsley Amis, Laurie Lee, Aldous Huxley and others had been left behind in Liverpool. Orwell's 1984 spoke strongly to someone studying the language and culture of the totalitarian state that was China. And, of course, Homage to Catalonia for its account of the politics of the Spanish civil war. But, I also read everything of his I could find. And on the recommendation of a Malaysian fellow student – in fact he was an aspiring barrister at the Inns of Court – I read all five Penguin volumes of The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell.

In terms of political texts, even before university I'd read the Communist Manifesto and rudimentary introductions to Marxism, in particular David McClellan's Marx that had just been published by Fontana Press (1975). It would be years later before I discovered the real gems that were Henri Lefebvre's Le Marxisme, (1948) and Pour connaître la pensée de Marx (1948). SOAS had a very politicized student body. When I arrived in the autumn of 1975, I was struck by a bright red slogan scrawled over the wall of the student bar: Victory to the Viet Cong; Saigon had fallen at the end of April. Student politics were dominated on the one hand by the Communist Party of Great Britain and its Labour student allies, and on the other by the International Socialists, a Trotskyist party (later to become the Socialist Workers Party); I was attracted to Trotsky's writings and to the political figure in exile in Mexico, but not to the contemporary British manifestations of Trotskyism. Maoism was even more of a turn-off, and unlike in France and Germany, it failed to attract the younger generation in search of a radical alternative. And then, of course, Eurocommunism oblige there was Antonio Gramsci. I read his Prison Notebooks and was enthralled. At that time I hadn't yet realised his key place in the landscape of cultural studies, and even Raymond Williams I knew mainly for his work on drama, especially his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. The Liverpool Everyman theatre put on some magnificent productions of both playwrights in the early 1970s when Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy were part of the company. I recall a wonderfully ludic production of The Good Woman of Szechwan. When at university I bought Williams's George Orwell: a collection of critical essays and his Fontana Modern Masters Orwell; later Williams would turn against Orwell berating what he perceived as Orwell's rejection of Marxism and his chauvinism. Alongside Williams stood the historian E.P. Thompson whose The Making of the English Working Class awoke in me an understanding that there were alternative ways of perceiving and writing history. Similarly eye-opening was Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy who like Williams paved the way to cultural studies as a philosophy and a discipline. 

Midway through my undergraduate years, I specialised in "Chinese" poetry which comprised both pre-modern and modern poetry, and it was the modern poets' interest in Russian and Soviet poets that led me to Mayakovsky and Esenin. But the great revelation was nothing to do with the poetry course, rather it was my discovery of Victor Serge. Serge, a dissident Belgian-born Russian revolutionary unmasked in his writing the reality behind Stalin's Soviet Union. I read Serge's novel S'il est minuit dans le siècle/Midnight in the Century, and then anything else of his I could find. His novels helped me to understand what the lived reality of communism in China must be like. There was an extensive correspondence between Serge and Trotsky. And although there was much initial sympathy between them, they disagreed over the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) which Serge supported, as did Orwell, during the Spanish Civil War. Serge also contested the timeliness of the founding of the Fourth International, and insisted on a transparent reappraisal of the Kronstadt mutiny. These points of dissension eventually led to an acrimonious rupture between them. Serge like Trotsky ended his days in Mexico. Trotsky died with a Stalinist ice pick in his head, while Serge ostensibly died of a heart attack while hailing a taxi, although it later transpired that Soviet security ran a cell of liquidators within the cab-driving fraternity.

At the same time, I didn't neglect books about Chinese studies. I read whatever I could find. In my first year, I was even engrossed in everything written about Chinese legal history. Later, when I spent a summer semester in Taiwan, I took advantage of pirated editions of works on Chinese law literature and society sold by the celebrated Cave's bookstore and bought all the books I couldn't afford back home. Taiwan was not a party to international copyright conventions and the pirated editions were cheap. I bought Needham's Science and Civilisation in China and dozens of the standard translations of pre-modern poetry. However, modern works of literature were severely censored and modern 1920s-1940s works by writers who'd stayed on mainland China were banned by Chiang Ching-kuo who remained loyal to his recently deceased father, Chiang Kai-shek's strict anti-communist stance. My last day in Taiwan was also the day I received a rare treasure. I'd met and became friendly with a young man who declared his politics to be anti-imperialist. He made a living out of exporting basic stationary essentials such as pencils and pens. Our first encounter had been at an open-air hillside restaurant not far from the National Palace Museum. It was the first time I'd seen and eaten Black Chicken. I'd just gone through Taipei airport customs and was about to board the plane for Hong Kong when I was tapped on the shoulder by a security guard who handed me a large, heavy brown envelope and pointed back along the corridor to my acquaintance who was waving from behind the barrier. Opening the package on the plane, I found a copy of an early wood-block edition of the Jinpingmei 金瓶梅, a sixteenth-century fictional work celebrated in part known for its risqué content. And thus were Taiwan customs circumvented.

In the fourth and final year of my degree, I was studying modern poetry in earnest. Given the affection the Francophile and Hispanophile Chinese poets showed for modern French and Spanish poetry, I was able to indulge my own interest in French poetry by simply following up on theirs. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Mallarmé were all known and frequently translated by the early twentieth-century poets. García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, and Azorín were all translated from the Spanish into Chinese by the poet Dai Wangshu 戴望舒 about whose life and work I would later write my PhD thesis. However, as an undergraduate I was chiefly attracted to the poetry of Ai Qing 艾青. After the 1949 Communist victory, many established writers of the pre-1949 era chose to retreat into translation or the study of pre modern literature or even oracle bones - anything that was not immediately politically sensitive. Ai Qing  – the father of the now celebrated artist  Ai Weiwei 艾未未 – was one of the few poets to carry on plying his craft. Now, he simply chose to avoid sensitive subjects by writing uniquely about experiences inspired by his trips abroad. One such trip was to Latin America, during which he visited Pablo Neruda on Isla Negra where the Chilean poet was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He dedicated a long poem to Neruda describing his Isla Negra home. It was called "On a Chilean Promontory" 在智利的海岬上. I came across the poem in the magazine Renmin wenxue 人民文學 (People's Literature) in the SOAS library one day, it was one of the last poems Ai Qing published before being exiled for his political crimes. It was during my final year that Ai Qing after over a decade of exile, literally, in the desert that Ai Qing resurfaced. He'd been assumed dead. In fact, he'd been comparatively lucky, many of his contemporaries had fallen foul of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976); but Ai Qing had in large part been punished for standing up to Mao's anti-writer policies back in the 1940s and was banished well before the Cultural Revolution. It was a couple of years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Ai Qing was finally "rehabilitated". His friend Neruda was no more. He had seemingly succumbed to cancer a few days after Allende was toppled by a CIA-backed coup d'état on 11 September 1973; sixty years later it would be found that Neruda had in fact been assassinated by poisoning. The poem was not part of my undergraduate modern poetry syllabus, which was not meant to extend beyond the Republican era (1912-1949); poems written in the 1950s somehow fell off the spectrum. I, nevertheless, translated the poem into English and then with my Chilean friend Hernán Rosenkranz into Spanish. We sent it off to a literary review called Araucaria but heard no more about it. China at that time was an ally of the USA with which it stood in the final phase of the Cold War against the Soviet bloc. In such a geopolitical context, it was unsurprising that a poem written by a Chinese communist poet would not be received gladly. But, for years I still thought the poem ought to be published, all the more so after Hernán himself had died. Finally, some 45 years after it was translated, with the intercession of Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco, the poem was finally published in the Mexican review Nexos; you can find it here: Ai Qing: Un poema para Neruda. For some twenty-five years, I'd taught the "Chilean" poems of Ai Qing – there were several – and thus in a sense this particular circle was closed – the extra-curricular had become curricular.

After my undergraduate degree I obtained a scholarship to study for two years at Peking University. But in order to get there there was one further Chilean link I had to use. I'd understood that UK students studying literature were automatically sent to the north-eastern university of Shenyang. Having heard reports from students who'd already studied there I had no desire to follow them, I wanted to be at the heart of things. I found out that in order to study at Peking University the only course open to me would be Political Economy - a Marxist discipline which masked the study of economics that was only just being reinstated in the university. I turned to Benny Pollack, a friend of Hernán Rosenkranz and a professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool. Benny and Hernán would later write together the definitive work Revolutionary Social Democracy: The Chilean Socialist Party (1986). I explained my predicament to Benny Pollack who very graciously wrote me a letter of recommendation setting out my competence in politics and economics. I then spent the summer before I left for China mugging up on Marxist economic theory so as to give some semblance of truth to the legend. Years later, after the fall of Pinochet's regime, Benny would be appointed Chilean ambassador to China.

My years in China were less about reading and more about lived experience: Listening and talking to Chinese people who'd lived through the 1950s to 1970s, travelling and recording what I saw through my camera lens; photography has long been a passion and it was put to constant use in China. But, the reading I'd done over the previous four years prove to be an indispensable asset for understanding the political and social system I encountered. It would also form the foundation of doctoral work back in London. But that is another story.

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