This book has a charming cover and an even more catchy title. But it disappoints those who expect to read about the angst, trials and tribulations of a society in transition during the 1980s. This book is clearly not going to say much about this — it is largely about the life of a person in transition.
China was, at that time, caught in the middle of change, between socialism and an open, uncertain future. In a way, China was more open than before, because of open door in 1978, but the boundaries that an individual could trespass were hazy. Nobody, party members included, quite knew what was permitted, and what was not — save perhaps the cardinal rule that the monopoly of the Party could not be questioned. This memoir comes across as Lijia’s personal journey who, like many others, is on the same boat: muddling through the maze of the system but working it to the hilt.
Lijia Zhang is now an established writer and social commentator, but she began her career as a worker in a state military factory in Nanjing in 1980, when she was all of 16. A young Lijia nursed varying ambitions and understandably, being a worker was not one of them. The job was literally a forcible hand-me-down from her mother who was acting on rumours that the state policy of “replacing job” offer (whereby one’s job could be passed on to next of kin) was to be the last such round. A state job came with obvious benefits (such as salary, house and pension) as also the more inane ones such as guanxi and free showers in the workplace. Not surprisingly, Lijia’s mother who had experienced the political uncertainty of Cultural Revolution and lived with the tight rationing of necessities, wanted to bequeath the inheritance, no less.
Lijia’s book portrays her journey through her immediate universe — family, workplace and the everyday. Lijia lives with her grandmother and her dominating mother, who thrusts both her job and aspirations on her. Her father draws a blank as a largely absent figure as his hukou (household registration) deemed that he stay in a separate city, which literally translated into her father visiting them 12 days a year! Then there is life at the military factory with comrades-in-arms — a motley crew of die-hard communists, reluctant comrades and princelings, given to connections. Some cadres were openly willing to toe the ‘party’ line while others delighted in bending rules and secret pleasures — such as canto-pop. The factory life with its cliques, petty politics is ruled by the invisible hand and provides a glimpse of those times. There were obtuse rules — such as the “period police”, which kept tabs on women’s cycles to keep a check on both wanted and unwanted pregnancies. Lijia, reluctant to be a worker all her life, wants to break free and gets hope when she she gets through a mechanical engineering course at an Open University. Later, she teaches herself English, hoping to be a translator — which she does become.
A large chunk of the book, however, is intimate and voyeuristic, and unfortunately so. It reads more like a torrid coming-of-age memoir with more juice on Lijia’s personal life than on the unique social and political context of the 1980s. Lijia trumps communism and her fate, or so it seems, in the face, with several sexapades with a string of strange boyfriends — graduating from wide-eyed innocent love to sneaky tribulations in the factory (where else?) and later hotels and parks.
Incidentally, Lijia was at the forefront of organising fellow workers at the factory, in support of Tiananmen in 1989. Given this role one would think that the memoir would capture the angst of that generation — their hopes and the transition blues. But no. Lijia, is now based in Beijing, and comfortably so. The book does not transgress the unspoken boundaries. Quite frankly, the Communist party (and we) couldn’t care less about her personal life and very oblique references to her role and the events that led up to Tiananmen.
Upon interrogation for her role in Tiananmen, Lijia replies that she had organised the demonstration because she thought it was “patriotic”. Lijia finds a way out of China — she gets a passport, an ordeal for those who remotely participated in 1989, when her “guanxi spinning” sister helps produce a letter that makes no mention of her role in 1989. The bottom line of the book is it pays to be resourceful.
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While the book captures the humdrum of ordinary life well — from the flashes of wit, the delightful colloquial idioms, to a world of Chinese swear words and slang — somewhere it just fails to strike a chord. We lose track of the boyfriends and sadly, the plot.
As for Lijia, she has since moved back to Beijing, probably having the last laugh, on how she has made a quick and clever transition from factory to market. And as for the book, the adage “never judge a book by its cover” holds good for this one.
SOCIALISM IS GREAT!A WORKER'S MEMOIR OF NEW CHINA
Lijia Zhang
Anchor Books
363pp; Rs 986
