A generation without choices
Tang Ying
Having the doors open now to the world outside following the new economic policies and liberalisation, young writers in China are now experiencing a new atmosphere of expressional freedom, forbidden to them for decades since the Cultural Revolution. Irrespective of generic variances, their voice is undisputed over the impact the Cultural Revolution had on their lives, which, they say, "was a deprivation from culture".
Author of two novels, four collections of short fiction and a few films and television scripts, TANG YING represents this new generation that chronicles the past pangs and the present awakening of one of the world's most ancient civilisations. She doesn't mince her words while talking about the two Chinas she has seen in her life: the Maoist China and the contemporary more liberal China. Excerpts from an interview with THACHOM POYIL RAJEEVAN.
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WHAT are your views on contemporary Chinese literature?
I am not a scholar in the literature of my country. It is so vast that one needs extraordinary knowledge to say something about it even in general. What I can say is only about Shanghai, my city and province. Since the doors of my country were opened in 1980, the general mood of the people is to "escape". "Run, run, run, escape!" is all that people seem to say to one another. This rush for the "great escape" is being reflected in our writings as well. People feel that they are new citizens and the contemporary is a sort of "New Citizen Writing".
How do the new writers view the Cultural Revolution?
It is still in us as a fresh scar from which blood oozes. People had lost faith in the future. So they began to think that their future was on the other shore, not on their land. That's the reason for many talented persons leaving our country. Most of the new writers are the products of the Cultural Revolution. We were children when the Red Guards were breaking into our houses and pulling down our gods, the gods whom our fathers and mothers depended in life's crisis. We heard the Red Guards warning our parents against raising us religiously. For them spirituality and religion were one. So, we grew up without knowing what to do in a crisis in life; crisis that political ideologies can never find a solution for. My mother could, still can, pray, but we children don't know how to pray; we can only worry.
The Cultural Revolution made us a generation that had no choices, a generation of "no culture". The predicament of no choice, perhaps more agonising than having choices, resulted in the break up of our personal lives and families.
About your writing?
My first novel No Love in Shanghai is about a divorced couple caught in the tide of this "great escape". It tries to juxtapose two worlds: the old and the new. To be sincere, we do not know how to cope with the new situations. It's all new to us. In my novel, the wife who goes to America to pursue her dreams comes back to China to divorce her husband. It's only then that she realises that the city is strange, filled with desire and corruption. Now, her husband is the only person she can communicate with in the unfamiliar city. But they are strangers as they have already begun to live in divorced worlds in all respect.
What is the background of your novel, The Girls in a-Fei Street?
In 2000, I lived in New York. I met my classmates, old friends and neighbours who had fled the country during the Cultural Revolution, and whom I hadn't seen for over 20 years. During our meetings, the past events surged as if from the bottom of a sea. The past had been following them as a nightmare, even if they were living in a totally different atmosphere in New York. It showed the Cultural Revolution didn't end in our minds. It would affect us over a long period of time. This experience ended in that novel. It is the story of five women recounting different experiences in their lives during the Cultural Revolution, but ultimately, the stories are the same.
How does the post-Cultural Revolution generation respond to the new writings?
I always worry whether the young readers would be patient enough to read about our past. My objective is to take them into the past through the present. The present is a free space; say New York: a deep, fearful, mysterious, and seductive space. A free world which we had imagined for a long time. Recalling the past into this space is all our generation can do.
Zhang Xian, a reputed new generation theatre professional (Xian, also a well-known film director, is Ying's husband) adapted my novel, No Love in Shanghai for a play. The play had a high box office value and was staged houseful for three months. And that was the first civilian theatre production. Until 1990, stage was used only for ideological propaganda for the Party, and the avant-garde theatre activists, like Zhang Xian had to go underground.
Your future plans?
I lived in New York for nearly one year from 2003. This gave me an opportunity to understand the situation of the Chinese expatriates. Based on their experience, I want to write non-fiction, which can be titled as Another China. In this book, I wish to show how the expatriate Chinese build their country and culture in other countries.
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