INTERVIEW | “Not only capitalist modernity, but the Chinese journey to socialism had also been costly too right from the beginning. A journey paved with blood and revolutionary rage, it had chosen its victors and sufferers.”

Reading the cultural anthropologist Souchou Yao’s travelogue for the first time, just a handful of years after its publication - and with China under the shadow of President Xi Jinping’s leadership, the protests in Hong Kong and the incarcerations in Xinjiang - is like opening a time capsule. Captured within it is a sense of seemingly simpler certainties, even though the subject matter is anything but.

Before beginning his Chinese journey proper, Yao begins by describing himself, arriving as a boy in Malaysia from mainland China. Southeast Asia was still on edge, in the shadow of various communist insurgencies. Leaving the market town of Dabu during the Cultural Revolution, Malaysia was a safer option, where the family business continued to thrive.

With his family maintaining links to mainland China, Yao is keenly aware of his own sense as an outsider/insider, which serves him well when he eventually returns on a trip to not just his ancestral town, but to the outposts.

What follows is a travelogue tied in with a frank assessment of his family’s history of privilege. Although not tremendously wealthy, the resulting class war saw them being branded as landlords and violently punished. It would have been easy to slip into this sense of anger and disgust, but Yao stays detached and avoids doing this.

On Brittle Ground covers a lot of territory, literally and figuratively: he journeys from Dabu to the harsh deserts of Xinjiang province, the old city of Xi’an, the crowded sites where the revolution was incubated and are now tourist havens, and seemingly forgettable places like the industrial city of Lanzhou. Yao’s book is a human portrait of China, with its stoic soldiers, discontented tour guides, defiant petty traders and the relatives who stayed behind.

I was able to speak to Yao, currently based in Australia. An edited transcript of our conversation follows:

Tham: Let’s talk a little about your approach to travel writing.

Yao: There are always very clear signs that travel writing is nonfiction, that everything is real. But it’s also not true in the sense that the first question for myself is: “How do you want to come across to the reader?”

You have to create a persona. I can’t give up my professional training when I speculate on things. The best travel writing is written like that. If you look at Bruce Chatwin, VS Naipaul ...

Tham: I know VS Naipaul is an extreme example because he is infamous for complaining about everything.

Yao: I am not VS Naipaul! Not only because I am not a Nobel Prize winner, but because I am not that kind of person. I think it’s unkind to the people, the land you travel in. I had a lot of problems with his writing. There’s a bit of a postcolonial problem there, but does he show his vulnerability.

Tham: In your case, you cast a sympathetic eye on China and tell deeper stories.

Yao: In my way, my book is a response to Wild Swans (by Jung Chang). It became a yardstick. This excessive narrative of suffering is a bit too much. To think she would hate China so much, and she makes China all about the Cultural Revolution, when China has a long history of thousands of years.

This is my little postcolonial thing going on, but I think it panders to Western readers’ tastes. So I deliberately bypassed this, I didn’t want to add on to it. I believe that every Chinese is a cultural nationalist, at least in little ways. But Chinese culture is based on incredible cruelty, especially towards women, built on exploitative structural systems.

Tham: In your case, it would be easy to be bitter about the Cultural Revolution.

Yao: Let’s put it this way: even if I was overwhelmed by bitterness, I would not let it dominate my writing. Despite the killings and the horrendous things that happened, I don’t want to draw on because that kind of narrative would overwhelm everything.

When I talk to my relatives, they would say: “Yes, the Cultural Revolution was hard, but we lived on. We have work to do; we had to build a socialist China.”

Incredibly, when I saw my sister again after my brother died, she told me - it was quite romantic, and I was moved. She said: “We built our marriage on this socialist system which we were a part of”.

And they decided that instead of a honeymoon, they volunteered to work as medical staff in a coal mine in Taiyuan!

Tham: When you first set out to write the book, did you have a specific plan in mind?

Yao: For most books that I have done, I always start with the first chapter or prologue, which outlines what I want to write about. Here, I started with a guava tree, and then spoke about the Blood and Bone fertiliser brand, and linked it to various issues that were later discussed, even if the opening seems to meander.

Travel writing is easier than an academic book since you are writing about a journey with a beginning and an end. In travel writing, you need to execute the ending in such a way that there is a little bit of closure, but not all the way. You tease the possibility that you don’t remember everything.

When I wrote this book, I tried to create an atmosphere. I would think of Dickens, Flaubert, Zola, people like that. What I learnt from them was that an event might happen in a flash, but your meditation of it might make it more than it is.

Conrad is very good at that. The other thing I learn from travel writing - Chatwin, Theroux, Jonathan Raban - they are usually very reluctant to give their secrets away. What I learned from Raban is that when you are travelling, you are taking two journeys at a time. One is physical movement, the other is in your head.

Tham: Let’s talk about “Red Tourism”, the pilgrimages to where the revolution was built, like Yenan.

Yao: You just go from one centre to another. Like Mao Zedong’s family home, the house where he was born, and then to Yenan, Changzhang (the Zhongshan Incident), where Zhou Enlai led the first Communist uprising in 1926.

You can start using that to talk about what Maoism is so important. Because (pre-Long March) Chinese Communism was so controlled, so dominated by the (leftist faction of) the Kuomintang, the Soviet Union, they had to start the revolution correctly, with the urban working class as the vanguard. But Mao was marginalised because of his views about the peasants as the vanguard because Moscow trained all his colleagues!

Tham: Interesting that you brought this up because Mao himself did not study abroad.

Yao: Zhou Enlai went to study engineering in Germany, and he had an illegitimate son there. Deng Xiaopeng went to France to work in the Renault factory, in those days the Europeans offered very simple working scholarships. Zhu De too, he also went to Germany.

But Mao was the only one who didn’t leave China. But in the end, the Cultural Revolution broke up the incredible comradeship between men like them and Liu Shaoqi.

Tham: When you talk about going on two different journeys, I am reminded of Gao Xingjian’s novel, Soul Mountain, which has a strong autobiographical, travelogue element as part of its narrative technique.

Yao: To be very honest, I read it because the translator, Mabel Lee, is a good friend of mine. I would say Gao is very typical, in that he has the great excitement of other Chinese writers who pick up new techniques.

He includes personal experiences, dream sequences, travel writing and surrealist fantasy, like Journey to the West. I feel I am on a rich diet! Because I went to a Chinese school in KL, we studied the old literature of the 30s and 40s, works by Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Lao She, Ding Ling - those for me are wonderful examples of writing because it fits my temperament.

They had an agenda, but their narratives are not pompous, unlike Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber). In Sydney, I devised a course called Chinese Modernity because of that period, the May 4th Movement.

That period, for me, is always very exciting. For the new Chinese writing, I have read some of it, it’s very rich. I get a bit embarrassed about how I compare these writers. I shouldn’t do that.

But I do like liumang wenhua - Chinese gangster literature - and there are young people writing manga-type stories, with rock and roll, urban decay and excitement. I think there’s great potential.

The older people will get their Nobel prizes, but the younger people should experiment, get more publicity, and if they start now, in twenty years, they will be great, more organically into postmodern narratives.

WILLIAM THAM WAI LIANG is an editor at Gerakbudaya and the author of two novels. His new novel, The Last Days, is set in 1981 and covers the continuing legacy of the Emergency. His first book, Kings of Petaling Street, was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize in 2017.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.