"The Backstreets" by Perhat Tersun

Perhat Tursun is a writer and poet. To read his short novel The Backstreets is to be reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s a disturbing, unsettling kind of book, and it becomes more so when you realize it’s largely autobiographical. 

Tursun (born in 1969) is a Uyghur, the large Muslim minority that for generations were farmers and herdsmen in Xinjiang in western China. Life became difficult under Chinese communist rule, until the death of Mao Zedong. Life became easier, until about the turn of the century. Then began what became a systematic effort by the Chinese government to submerge the Uyghurs into Chinese culture and life and, barring that, eradicate their society. Persecution began in earnest when the Chinese began to borrow the language of the global “War on Terror.” The Chinese deny the charges of genocide, but it’s becoming increasingly impossible to say it’s anything but that. The evidence is too strong, and it’s growing stronger. That the Uyghurs occupied land that contained sizable energy reserves didn’t serve their security in a Chinese state desperate for energy to power factories.

 

Tersun had been one of the favored few to be educated at a Chinese university in Beijing, but he began to arouse the government’s concern with the publication of his work, like his poetry collection One Hundred Love Lyrics, his novella collection Messiah Desert, and his novel The Art of Suicide which led to his blacklisting as a writer for the next 15 years  The manuscript of The Backstreets was completed in 2015 but never published in China.

 

The main character, a man, is never named. Trained at a university in the east, he works in a western Chinese city that is dominated by ethnic Chinese, although it wasn’t always so. His boss is the “smiling man,” whose smile increases the angrier he gets. And he gets very angry with the narrator, who intentionally and unintentionally doesn’t conform to expectations. 

 

Perhat Tersun

The man spends a great deal of the novel walking the backstreets of the city, trying to find his room. He’s frustrated by both a thick, almost impenetrable fog and the fear of the few people he meets. The search for his room symbolizes the search to find (and understand) his place and thus his own identity. But it never happens, and he never learns who he is, because it’s been taken away. He has memories, pleasant and unpleasant of his childhood, but his family seems to exist only in a distant past. 

 

The novel draws from Tursun’s own life – his education, his childhood, and his work in the city of Urumchi in Xinjiang. And he’s lived the experience of the Uyghurs in China. In early 2018, he disappeared. It was heard later that he’d been sentenced to 16 years in prison; the charges were unknown. 

 

The book has its own story. The translator, Darren Byler, teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and has published several books on China. He met with Tursun before the writer’s disappearance, a meeting arranged by a source only known as D.M. Another person, known as A.A., was helping with the translation. Both D.M. and A.A. also disappeared.

 

Reading The Backstreets is a sobering experience. Tursun depicts the alienation, the fear, and the persecution that happens when a person, and a people, are objectified by the state as terrorists or extremists. It’s a difficult book to read, but a necessary one.

 

Related:

 

A Uyghur Author and Translator Were Detained. Now Their Novel Speaks for Them.

“The Cultural Revolution” and “Mao Zedong”

There’s considerable renewed interest in the Chinese Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 and didn’t officially end until the death of Mao Zedong in 1975. For those of us alive at the time, the reports were initially sparse; China was a closed society, and the U.S. and China did not have formal diplomatic ties until 1972.  

What we heard at the time sounded like thousands, perhaps millions, of young people had turned universities upside down, denounced professors and other members of the Chinese elite, and upended society almost to the point of breakdown. The death toll may have been in the millions; no one knows for sure, because no one kept records (and it was probably dangerous even to consider keeping records). The death toll has been estimated anywhere between hundreds of thousands to 20 million.

 

What would be apparent only much later was the extent Mao Zedong himself was involved in it. Much attention and speculation focused on the so-called “Gang of Four,” close confidants of Mao, including his fourth wife. But when people in China said anything about the group, they always held up five fingers.

The Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong are concise studies published and paired together by Captivating History. And what they make clear is Mao’s central role in starting the revolution, how he did, and, most intriguingly, why he did. The impetus for turning young people loose on their elites (and often their own parents) had much to do with Mao’s concern about his legacy, preserving Chinese communism, and retaining his own position of power.

 

His grip on the country had been slipping since the disastrous failures of his Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward. Mao was also well aware of what happened in Russia to the legacy of Joseph Stalin, dismantled and upended after the dictator’s death. And he was well aware of the propensity of the political class to turn the country into some form of state-controlled capitalistic society. The Cultural Revolution was aimed at the very people most likely to challenge Mao’s grip on the country, and millions of people paid the price for the power struggle.

 

The Cultural Revolution provides the historical background to the event, the roles of key figures involved, Mao’s motivations, the context of a deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union, the mass killings and devastation that occurred (especially in north China), how it finally ended, and what were the long-term effects.

 

Mao Zedong explains the dictator’s early life (he did not come from the peasant or working class), how he came to embrace communism, the off-and-on battles with the Kuomintang of the Nationalist Party, the mythic Long March, the battles with Japan, the victory of the communists in 1949, and then the major events of Mao’s later life, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. 

 

What is clear is that there would have been no cultural revolution without Mao Zedong.

 

Captivating History, a kind of everyman’s history series, has published about 40 of these kinds of concise history books. In addition to these two on Chinese history, other publications have tackled a wide array of people and subjects, including Harriett Tubman, War of the Roses, Aaron Burr, Aztec history, ancient Israel, Egyptian mythology, and many others. The books provide a general overview for the general reader.

 

An interesting question is why there has been a renewed interest in the Cultural Revolution, especially in the United States and Western Europe. While so-called “cancel culture” exhibits only rudimentary similarities to what happened in China, concerns about American culture and society have been rising. The verbal attacks and campaigns against university professors, the often wholesale assaults on American history, schools being renamed, statues removed (and not only those of Confederates), and the often ruthless attacks on people on social media platforms all point to some kind of American “cultural revolution” being underway. 

 

“The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai” by Ha Jin

In college, I was part of the first two classes in Chinese history, courtesy of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and their recognition of the People’s Republic. Interest in all things Chinese had surged, and my university offered the history classes. As a senior, I had rank to get into the classes. 

What surprised me was how much we learned, not only about history, but about Chinese literature. The reason was that to know the country’s history, you had to know the country’s literature. And my history class was the first place I learned about the poet considered the greatest in Chinese history, Li Po, or, as he came to be known after the Anglicized Chinese was changed, Li Bai. 

Li Bai lived from 701 to 762 A.D. during the Tang dynasty, when China was already an ancient society. An indication of his longstanding popularity, which survived dynastic change, wars, and revolutions, is that Mao Zedong loved his poetry and Li Bai’s poems are still recited by Chinese schoolchildren today. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Saturday Good Reads

One of the routine, and often daily, events in American corporate life is yet another hack or attempted hack of a company’s computer systems. A significant source of the hacks is the People’s Republic of China. The targets tend to be companies involved with cutting-edge technology. This is news to no one; it’s occasionally reported. But the Chinese government has another focus of activity – neutralizing perceived internal threats. More than a million members of ethnic minorities, most of them Muslim, are in internment camps, required to do forced labor. Some of that labor has been found to make sports clothes for the U.S. market. 

And it isn’t only Muslims who are being arrested and imprisoned. Christians are being rounded up as well. A minister who disappeared last week had given a statement to friends to publish in the event he suddenly was gone, and he explains why he had to engage in faithful disobedience. I read that story about forced labor, and the statement by the pastor, and I have to think what it means every time I buy something “made in China.” And how difficult it becomes to buy something not “made in China.”

Christmas Roundup: It’s that time of the year, and I’ve found a veritable explosion of articles, posts, and poems about Christmas. Here are a few of best:  

“Silent Night” turns 200 this year; Edward Schmidt at America Magazine asks if it’s the great Christmas song ever. Lynn Mosher asks where’s the joy of Christmas, and then poses a test to see how well you think you know the Christmas story. Eleanor Parker looks at an Anglo-Saxon poem inspired by the texts sung at Vespers at Advent. Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer has two Christmas poems: December Crawl and Singing Silently. Kingdom Poets posted a beautiful poem by Rochard Wilbur, A Christmas Hymn. And Joseph Mussomeli at The Imaginative Conservative has a great take on a popular song, The Twelve Ways to Christmas.

Everything is politicized these days, and if something’s politicized, it means there must always be a political solution (it’s a power thing). Take friendship. Lester Berg (a pseudonym) is a literary writer living in Brooklyn; he’s got all the appropriate bonafides, except he voted for you know whom. You can guess what happened. And Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition is spitting into the media narrative wind by factually assessing the claim that “81 percent of evangelicals” voted for you know whom.

More Good Reads

Faith

How Caring for the Poor Led to the Beginnings of Capitalism – Dr. Glenn Sunshine at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

The Number 1 Reason for the Decline in Church Attendance,,,and Five Ways to Address It – Thom Rainer at Lifeway Facts & Trends.

Rest for the Weary – Eileen Knowles at The Scenic Route.

Writing and Literature

A Literary Pursuit of Beauty, Grace, and Truth – Michele Morin at Living Our Days.

Why do you do this? – Janet Reid, Literary Agent.

Reign of Love: The Fiction of Wendell Berry – Eric Miller at Commonweal.

Time to Schedule Your Writing Life Tune-up – Ann Kroeker. 

American Stuff

Fredericksburg: The Way They Saw It – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

Life and Culture

Humiliation Over Honor: The Long Term Impact Of Our Cultural Losses – Scott Savage at Thin Difference.

What Happens When an Evangelical Pundit, Armed Only with 58K Twitter Followers and a Reference to the Bebbington Quadrilateral, Takes on a Historian – John Fea at The Way to Improvement Leads Home.

How to Change the World in 2019: Reduce Anger – Zak Schmoll at Entering the Public Square.

Poetry

Somewhere Else Entirely – Ruth Fainlight at The Hudson Review.

Leeks – Richard Spilman at Image Journal.

Art and Photography

Elise Ritter - Maureen Doallas at Escape into Life.

Building an Image: The first glazing layers of “Thomas Touching the Side of Christ” – Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

Water World – Tim Good at Pixels.

Hanukah 2017 – Tom Darin via Facebook.

Where Are You Christmas? – The Piano Guys with Sarah Schmidt

Painting: Wife Helen Reading, oil on canvas by Frederick Serger (1889-1965). 

Ai Weiwei: Personal Art as Public Art

Last September in London, two days after we arrived for vacation, Ai Weiwei and fellow artist Anish Kapoor (known in America for his Cloud Gate sculpture, or “The Bean,” in Chicago) led an eight-mile walk from the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly to Kapoor’s artwork “Orbit” in Olympic Park at Stratford. The refugee problem seemed to have suddenly exploded upon Europe, and the two artists believed they had to make a statement in support of the refugees. They were joined by about 100 fellow marchers and, according to The Guardian, about as many journalists.

Fragments (2005)

“Everything is art. Everything is politics,” Ai Weiwei once said. He knows of what he speaks. His life and his art have often been ensnared in Chinese government politics. The march across London was two days before the Ai Weiwei exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. Only a few weeks before had the Chinese government granted him the right to travel to London for the exhibition.

Janet standing in front of Tree (2009-2010)

My introduction to Ai Weiwei and his art occurred in the bookshop of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Only vaguely aware of the China/Ai Weiwei controversy, I happened upon his Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants 2006-2009 during a visit in 2011. In 2006, the Chinese government had encouraged him to start a blog, and he did. What no one expected was how popular it would become, both in China and around the world. And the government certainly didn’t expect the artist to be as candid (and opinionated) as he was.

In 2009, Chinese authorities shut down his blog. Since then, he’s endured arrest, surveillance, and harassment, none of which has stopped him from speaking out. Ai Weiwei is not the only artist or citizen who’s been persecuted by the Chinese government (consider the current crackdown on Christian churches in the country), but he is likely the best known globally.

Cao, or Grass (2014)

My first direct exposure to Ai Weiwei’s art was at Blenheim Palace in 2014. The palace of the Duke of Marlborough is one of those architectural treasures that are simply awe-inspiring – the house itself is seven acres under roof. It’s also the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and he’s buried nearby at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon.

In 2014, Ai Weiwei had an exhibition at Blenheim, but it was not in special show galleries. A friend met us at the Oxford train station and together we drove to Blenheim. Instead, it was spread throughout the property, from a huge chandelier in the entrance foyer to ceramic crabs in one of the ornate 18^th century furnished rooms to a ceramic video camera in the library. It was jarring to see the juxtaposition of Ai Weiwei’s art with the architecture and furnishings of the palace, but that was likely the point.

His art is simultaneously personal and public, and “public” is often synonymous with “political.” It’s meant to call attention, not only to the artist but what the artist is saying. It’s often jarring and provocative but is always thought-provoking.

Bicycle Chandelier (2015)

The 2015 Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London included some of the artworks from Blenheim but added a considerable number of others. The show as classic Ai Weiwei: the ceramic crabs from Blenheim were clustered in a corner; one room contained hundreds of pieces of rebar assembled in a wave; a poster of names and ages recorded the lives of the children who died when a school collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. (I took the four photos included here during my visit to the exhibition.)

He often uses discarded and waste materials, a kind of artistic recycling project. Several of the pieces at the Royal Academy were representative of that, using castoff metal, wood and other materials.

The Royal Academy exhibition catalog

The exhibition catalog, simply entitled Ai Weiwei, is an excellent introduction to both the artist and the exhibition. In addition to the book collecting his blog posts, two other helpful resources are Ai Weiwei Speaks, an extensive interview with curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Weiwei-isms edited by Larry Warsh, a collection of his statements on art, freedom, government, the digital world, history, and other topics.

Ai Weiwei’s statements for the refugees continue. Recently, he wrapped the columns of the Berlin Concert Hall with the discarded life preservers used by hundreds of Syrian refugees fleeing on boats.

“My activism is part of me,” he says. “ If my art has anything to do with me, then my activism is part of my art.” For Ai Weiwei, the personal is the public is the political, because that is where he comes from.

Top photograph: Ai Weiwei demonstrating what the artist does bet – looking and seeing.

Ryan Pile’s “Chinese Turkestan”

Until 1972, my knowledge of China was essentially limited to the Judge Dee mysteries by Robert Van Gulik and American-made Charlie Chan movies based on the books by Earl Derr Biggers. In other words, what I understood was a combination of historical fiction and entertaining stereotypes.

That year, President Nixon made the historic opening to the People’s Republic of China. By the fall, when I was starting my senior year, LSU offered courses in Chinese history for the first time. And I took both that were offered. While I was an irregular class attendee (especially my last semester, when I was managing editor of the student newspaper), I read all of the required books for the courses plus others on my own. The books included Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, books about Chiang Kai-Chek and his formidable wife, the birth of the Chinese Republic in 1912, China during World War II, and overviews of the China’s long imperial history. I renewed my interest in Chinese history and affairs in the 1990s, even going so far as to try to teach myself Mandarin Chinese.

No, I didn’t succeed in learning the language. I still remember the words for “thank you,” however – pronounced something like “shay-shay.”

Like any large subject, the more you learn, the less you realize you know.

What I do know about China, however, is largely limited to the eastern half of the country. My knowledge and understanding of the western half, and particularly the province of Xinjiang (what we used to call Sinkiang), was limited to knowing it was where the Chinese tested their atomic bombs, and it was part of the territory that included the old Silk Road, the ancient trade route that linked China with India and the Mediterranean.

Along comes a book to help fill some of my ignorance, at least photographically. Chinese Turkestan: A Photographic Journey Through an Ancient Civilization by Ryan Pyle is an eye-opening wonder, filled with black-and-white photographs that capture the region’s character and the face of its people. And its people are only partially ethnic or Han Chinese. Most of the residents of Xinjiang are Muslim Uyghurs, although there has been a significant increase of ethnic Chinese moving to the area. And with that increase comes change.

Pyle uses the old name for the region for his title – Chinese Turkestan. “The old name conjures up a region without physical borders,” he writes in the introduction, “an admixture of an idea rather than a distinct geographical or political entity.” And that idea permeates Chinese Turkestan.

Ryan Pyle

You see the face of the people, young and old. You see them in their daily lives, eating, worshipping, dancing, working. You see their history and culture etched in their faces, and it is indeed an ancient history. 

What is perhaps most surprising about these photographs is their seeming timelessness. Many of the pictures could have been taken when cameras were first invented in the 1800s. What I believe Pyle is emphasizing is the continuity of the people and culture, even as they experience and deal with significant change. What is most suggestive is the people’s resilience, and reliance upon their traditional (and I suspect conservative) culture.

A native of Canada and a graduate of the University of Toronto, Pyle is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. His Chinese Turkestan is a beautiful book, treating its subject with a light hand and with an engaging respect.

Related:

The China Lens: Ryan Pyle is interviewed by China Today – the USC US-China Institute

The trailer for the book:

Top photograph: Woman picking cotton, from Chinese Turkestan by Ryan Pyle.

Poetry as Family History

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

Founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865, the China Inland Mission played a major role in Christian missions to that country from 1866 to 1949, when the Chinese communists defeated the Nationalists and took control. All foreign missionaries were expelled.

The history of the China Inland Mission (today called the Overseas Missionary Fellowship) overlaps the period of almost a century of turmoil and upheaval in China – the decline and eventual overthrow of the emperor, the Boxer Rebellion, the presidency of Sun Yat-Sen, the period of the warlords and the rise of the communists, the Japanese invasion in the mid-1930s and the forces of Mao driving the forces of Chiang Kai-shek to what it now Taiwan. The missions had an impact; even today, house churches exist in China in the face of official government opposition, persecution and often imprisonment.

The story of the mission has been told in memoirs, biographies, histories and novels. Last year, author Bo Caldwell published City of Tranquil Light, a wonderful novel based on the story of her missionary grandparents in rural China in the 1920s and 1930s (I reviewed the novel last December). D.S. Martin, a writer and poet in Ontario, has also told the story of his grandparents, who were in China at about the same time as Caldwell’s but remained until expelled by the communists.

The difference is that Martin has told his story in poetry. And it is a close personal story, in that Martin’s mother was an infant when she accompanied her parents to China and grew up in the country.

So the Moon Would Not Be Swallowed is a collection of 16 poems based upon letters to and from his grandparents and relatives, as well as research on the mission itself. And what Martin demonstrates is that poetry can serve, and serve well, as family history, providing a depth, texture and understanding beyond a traditional family biography or history.

Martin’s grandparents, Ernest and Marian Davis, arrive in China in 1923 and settle in Honan Province. This is the time of roving armies and warlords; security becomes a daily thing to be considered and planned for. From “Darkening Landscape:”

From the open plain to our east soldiers

have driven the brigands across the rail line

& up into the shadowy hills we can see to the west

Up there somewhere

Are the missionaries taken five weeks ago

The poem reads like a letter home, describing their home and the city of Yencheng where they live, across the river from barley fields that “stretch to the horizon.” China in 1923 is largely an agricultural economy.

War and civil unrest continue and then abate for a time. Another report home is the poem “Good Housekeeping:”

Finally war is over

Trains are running

Mail’s coming through…

But there’s much teaching to do

& walks are taboo The beach is horrible

With blood and memory of war

The beheaded & shot were buried in sand

But dogs will be dogs

In China as elsewhere

These few simple lines convey both relief and the horror of what’s happened. You know exactly what the dogs are doing without it having to be overtly stated.

The poems remind everyone that the Davis family is a family of foreigners, and foreigners are often a target of blackmail or brutality by bandits and troops. Another poem describes how close to death they often are: “They lined us up / I took a deep breath hit the floor / & rolled under a bed / lying for two nights beneath the robber-chief’s breathing…”

“Evacuation” describes their required move to Hankow for their safety in 1927, followed by poems which describe letters home about everything except the evacuation. The Davises experience the Japanese invasion, and later are separated for a time. The chaos continues after the Japanese defeat. And the last poem, “The Weather is Changing,” uses weather to describe the change in government, and what will be the end of their time in China.

Martin has honored his grandparents with these poems, telling the story of young couple committed to serving God regardless of the personal consequences.

Related:

Martin blogs at Kingdom Poets.

Illustration by Fran Hogan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.