Searching for Forgiveness in Beijing – A Journey into Betrayal

By Jan Wong

Jan Wong’s parents had done their best to help their daughter maintain links with the family’s origins.

“Linguistically torturing offspring is an overseas Chinese tradition, the solemn duty of the Chinese diaspora,” she ruefully observes.

“In Montreal, my Canadian-born parents signed my three siblings and me up for lessons in Cantonese, our ancestor’s dialect. After school on Fridays, they’d drag us down to Chinatown ... We hated those lessons and learned next to nothing.”

When Jan moved into her teens, China began to engage her imagination, as did the communism of Chairman Mao Zedong. She was, she now realises, “that very dangerous combination; fanatic, ignorant and adolescent”.

In that mindset, she set out for China, becoming one of only two foreign students permitted to study in Beijing University at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a time when an individual might be publicly beaten for accidentally tearing up a newspaper containing a photograph of Chairman Mao.

Because of her fanaticism, contemporary repression of human rights seemed right and proper to Jan. So right and proper that when a fellow student named Yin Luayi asked her about life in America and how to get out of China, the young Canadian immediately shopped her to the authorities. Yin disappeared. Jan Wong thought little of it at the time.

That was what happened to disloyal, counter-revolutionary Chinese. She finished her course and returned to Canada where she became a hugely successful, if controversial, journalist.

More than three decades later, having, for no clear reason, retrieved a dusty box of old diaries from her mother’s basement, she paged through one year’s offerings and came upon the entry describing Yin Luayi’s conversation and fatal question. With a sinking heart, she faced a forgotten truth:

“Thirty-three years ago, in one thoughtless, misguided moment, I destroyed someone’s life. I ratted out a stranger at Beijing University who wanted to get to America. At the time I did not give it much thought. I certainly did not understand the enormity of what I had done. I recorded the incident in my diary, and forgot about it.”

Wong decided that on a forthcoming family trip to China she would try to find out, first of all, if Yin had survived and, if she had, what had happened to her. Chinese Whispers is an account of her search, through old friends and enemies, for links to the woman she betrayed.

On the face of it, the book is about betrayal, totalitarian thinking, late-onset conscience and a search for redemption. The reality is that it is mostly a travel book exploring modern China in chapters, some of which make only peripheral reference to the search for Yin. Those chapters amount to self-contained essays on aspects of China today and are fascinating in their own right. She sketches the changing requirements of foreign countries trying to do business there, suggesting that speaking Mandarin is now essential, as more and more Chinese companies hire foreigners fluent in that language to impress clients.

Wong casts a cool eye on China’s booming economy, where the gross domestic product is up 10%, industrial production is up 14% and the country enjoys a trade surplus of $163 billion, a current account balance of $160 billion and nearly $1 trillion in foreign reserves. That, she establishes, must be set against pollution so bad that visibility and the capacity to breathe in cities like Beijing are severely and constantly compromised.

In addition, as one of her interviewees points out, a key reason for China’s rapid development is lack of civic opposition.

“Before the masses fully wake up to the notion of property rights,” she observes, “the Communist Party is sending SWAT teams into neighbourhoods armed with buckets of red paint. They daub a single character on any building destined for destruction ... it means ‘demolish’.”

That single character, she suggests, is devastating neighbourhoods, communities and traditional ways of life throughout China, while destroying the historic character of the capital city, leaving kitsch reproductions of famous buildings in place to make tourists believe they’re seeing the real thing.

As an introduction to a vast nation still tightly controlled by the Communist Party and the police, while moving seamlessly into a capitalism dominated by western brand name luxury goods (or their fake equivalent), Jan Wong’s book should be on the shelf of anyone planning to work or study there.

Where it fails is – oddly – in its central theme. Having engaged the reader in her search for the woman she wronged, Wong clutters the storyline with endless trivia, some of it related to the family members accompanying her on the trip. We learn, at tedious length, of several encounters with a fruit called a durian. The durian’s distinguishing characteristic is a nauseating smell. It’s worth, at most, a paragraph. It gets a lot more.

Ultimately, however, the book fails as an exercise in redemption because the writer is so self-absorbed. Even her family tend to serve as props in the telling of her own story. In one telling detail, she mentions that her Chinese-speaking husband Norman does not like the translation (“Fat Paycheque”) of his Chinese name.

Yet she refers to him throughout the book by precisely that name. Similarly, although she talks about her betrayal of the young Chinese student, she is not only over-eager for self-exculpation, but tangibly irritated by the fact that several of the dramatis personae downplay the drama, thereby reducing not just her own emotional purgation, but the impact on the reader.

As journalism, the book works, entertaining and informing the reader in equal measure. As autobiography, it is a busy, trivial failure.