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Photo illustration by John Kehe – Staff/ Photo AP |
'Inside the Red Mansion' goes behind China's new facade
On the heels of a wanted man, a journalist takes an eerie voyage through modern China.
from the July 31, 2007 edition
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Many of today's Chinese, he hypothesizes, don't know how to integrate their peasant roots into a strange new world of money, prestige, and power. August collects friends and contacts along the road to Lai yet ends up with an uncomfortable feeling that he never really knows them.
He befriends Lili, the madam at a nightclub frequented by Lai. He visits the apartment with mock rococo moldings where she lives with a clandestine pet dog and he pages through a vanity photo album featuring Lili in various costumes and staged poses. But of her childhood in the countryside he learns nothing.
To travel with August through China is to be tantalized by quirky glimpses of a maverick culture – one in which golf is played at night to avoid a farmerlike tan, where churches can exist as long as they acknowledge that God is not the highest authority, and where people nonchalantly assume that the media always lies.
August is an entertaining and observant tour guide. He brings to life waiters who lunge "like kamikaze pilots" and makes note of carpet so soft and spongy that it seems "a little sinister." And yet somehow we never seem to arrive anywhere that we really want to go. Much is seen – but more remains missing.
Eventually Lai surfaces in Vancouver and August follows. Interviews August does suggest that Lai was being toyed with all along by his government – allowed to establish illicit trade at low import tariffs, but only so long as that aided China. "Beijing was having it both ways," August writes. "It encouraged citizens to act ever more freely, but without guaranteeing the legality of their actions."
It's ugly and rather murky but then so is most of what August describes. In the end it's hard to tell: Is the life of the new China really so hollow – or just in hiding?
Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments to Marjorie Kehe.
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