1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir

"I thought it was great. It was very interesting. There was a lot in it about his father, Ai Qing, and the time the Party suppressed his poetry and didn’t allow him to keep writing. There were a lot of scenes from struggle sessions (or ‘education sessions’, as they would have called them) in the places where they were exiled. There was a lot about just the general toughness of life. If you had gone from a city where you had water coming out of the tap, and you could cook fairly easily, and then you were sent to a cabin where you couldn’t—that would be a big hardship. In the 1980s China was a very exciting place. There was the opening up in the economy and also in the arts which was very heady, especially for those of us who were living in Beijing. In business, you had this explosion of entities from just a few dozen in a particular industry to thousands. One of the effects of that was that the regulators couldn’t keep up. So they had to restructure the way businesses were regulated, because you could no longer have one person per entity, to micromanage its operations. So things got a lot freer. Also, people had been very tied to the place where they were born. They still are in many ways. But prior to 1995 (technically) and 1980 (in reality), people could not leave their place of residence or their jobs without permission. But after that, as China built all these exporting hubs on the coast, they needed people to work there. So people started to move for work to the coast, and you eventually got 300 million people traveling around the country. That, of course, changed a lot of the way the place is governed. In the arts there was this explosion of music and poetry and novels and the visual arts. It was also very tentative and experimental. For example, you had to have art exhibits in a park, or I hosted one in my apartment at the Friendship Hotel. The concerts were held at embassies, the art exhibitions might be in a restaurant or another private space. It was all very cautious, and only available to certain portions of the public, but there was all this new stuff. So that was very interesting, and one felt that it might increase. What happened, of course, was the Tiananmen protests and the suppression of dissent. The government restructured and exerted a whole lot more control—and a lot of those new outcroppings of the arts disappeared and were suppressed. In the early 2000s, that was brushed under the rug, in a way, because the government was pouring so much money into the economy, and everybody had all of these opportunities. They thought, ‘Well, okay, so we may not be able to listen to this new music or see these new paintings, but our salaries are rising, there’s so many more opportunities. It’s great.’ And the West really bought into the idea that everything was changing and evolving. But, by the time of the Olympics in 2008, it became pretty clear that that wasn’t going to happen. I guess it was a sense of exile because there is an awful lot about China that I really love. I lived there a really long time and I really miss China—but I can’t go back now, because of the politics. There was a sense when I first arrived in 1985, that everything was changing and opening, and it was exciting. You could talk to people and get what they really thought and there were protests and marches past the Friendship Hotel that I used to join. There were salons that I could go to. There was a bookstore that had performances of music, there were poets who would wander the country and come and give readings. It was very exciting. That’s all gone. I just feel that it’s a little bit sad. I just wanted to describe what that trajectory was like. It’s very hard to know. As has been demonstrated amply in the United States, I do think that propaganda works. A lot of people are very supportive of the Party and of Xi Jinping . A lot of people have left their original communities, a lot of people are living among people they don’t know. There is a lot of dissatisfaction around—over falling income, over crime, over the various restrictions on life. But has that been sewn together into a general narrative about the Party? I don’t know. I doubt it."