Behind the Wall

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Behind the Wall: A Journey through China  by Colin Thubron/i]

REVIEW BY JEZZA

In the late 1980s Colin Thubron travelled extensively through China, at a time when it was just starting to open up after being inaccessible to travellers for so long. In order to better understand the society he taught himself Chinese, and vowed to stay in the cheapest hotels, using public transport to get around. Upon arrival in Beijing his initial sense of dislocation takes time to overcome – he fears that he will never break through the surface, that life there will remain perpetually enigmatic and that the Chinese will remain unknowable. Nevertheless, in casual encounters he begins to piece together an image of the vastness of Chinese history and how it has affected the lives of individuals.

The first person he encounters in Beijing gives an insight into the contradiction – a former maths teacher reduced to selling trinkets who only wants to go to university in America. Old at 34, he is one of the countless victims of the Cultural Revolution, the anarchy that terrorised the country under Mao between 1966 and 1977, when anyone could be packed off to the countryside to live as a peasant, where students humiliated their teachers, intellectuals were given degrading jobs and the entire society was turned upside down. Thubron shows a great honesty in his attempts to understand how such events could happen without seeking to judge them. He acknowledges the stereotypes he unthinkingly carries with him – chiefly his fear that the people will somehow be inscrutable, and wonders how the tradition of conformity encouraged the Cultural Revolution, or how the concept of the loss of face made it all the more damaging when people were forced to attend criticism sessions, criticism being a euphemism for everything from verbal abuse to torture.

By travelling independently of a group he can go more or less where he wants, unencumbered by guides. On a trip to the seaside he observes a people unused to visiting the beach for leisure – they paddle but do not swim, and many of the crowds promenading up and down are dressed just like they would be on the factory floor. Naggingly puritanical notices warn that only dark coloured bathing suits must be warn, to avoid the illusion of nudity. The regimentation he observes in a children’s nursery school he finds disturbing in its orderliness, in the subsuming of the individual child into the mass, where even aged 4 the blankets on the children’s beds must be folded just so, and this is emphasised again on a tour of a top high school, where the pupils chant dead-sounding speeches: “We think our school is lively and interesting. We study very hard”. The girl assigned to show him around, however, seems a typical teenager, mocking of authority, uninspired by her teachers and ultimately just homesick. In a country where children aged 3 are routinely sent away to boarding school, this rebellious streak comes as a relief.

Thubron talks to many people along the way, cataloguing their hopes and fears as they describe their everyday lives. Despite speaking the language he often encounters a complete gulf of understanding which seems insurmountable. Walking through a food market where kittens are mewling pitifully in bamboo baskets, although he strives to be objective, he is so much a product of his western sensibilities that he cannot help but be moved by their plight. When he comes across a large owl in a cage that is no doubt destined to end up as soup, he decides to act, and spontaneously buys it, hoping to set it free in the countryside. He knows he’s being sentimental, but does so anyway. Later that night, when he surreptitiously releases it out of the train window, he turns round after it glides silently away in the darkness to find the businessman in the opposite bunk watching him in horror, appalled at his wastefulness.       

Two years after the book was written, the events in Tiananmen Square were beamed around the world as a demonstration became a massacre. The opening up that Thubron had noticed on his trip was put on hold, but the changing mood suffered a setback rather than a reversal, and no-one could have predicted the huge economic boom that China has since experienced, or how the old order is fading away. He catches the mood of the time, of being on the brink of something, and endeavours to interpret what he sees around him. Often he writes with a luminous clarity – beautifully descriptive passages, where a few well-chosen words unforgettably capture a scene. Most of all, the book is honest. He continually seeks to overcome his preconceptions, striving for objectivity and open-mindedness, and it is this, more than anything, that not only gives him an insight into the country in the book, but which will also dictate the successfulness of how the rest of the world interacts with China in years to come.