There has been a slew of fine autobiographies recently about growing up during the Cultural Revolution, that chaos which engulfed China from 1966 to the death of Mao in 1976. For one thing, writers are safe to explore it after the Communist Party admitted the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a grave error. Moreover, time has sharpened their memories.
Chinese writer Yan Lianke. Photo: Supplied
The latest memoir is Yan Lianke’s Three Brothers; Memories of My Family, billed as a powerful story of family and politics during the Cultural Revolution. Yan, who has had several satirical books banned in China, has been such a strong critic of modern Chinese politics that you might expect a yarn filled with crazed Red Guards, unfathomable brutality and catastrophe. Something like Ma Jian’s novel, China Dream, reviewed in the Listener last July, which was filled with ideologically pure Red Guards killing each other in villages over which troupe was most correctly Maoist. But Yan tells us a different, quieter and more powerful, story.
Yan’s story of the three brothers, his father and two uncles, is earthy and intimate but also age-old. His heroes are peasants who are locked in the ancient struggle against nature, death and their own shortcomings. The seasons come and go, crops grow or fail, people marry and die, and Mao is somewhere else a long way away. But this ancient way of life is also being upended by modern life and politics does occasionally intrude. The Revolution here is a creeping disturbance.
Three Brothers is the story of Yan Lianke's family during the struggles of the Cultural Revolution. Photo: Supplied
The first of Yan’s characters is his father, a peasant who focuses squarely on providing for his family. His dream is to see his children married. When he is given a plot of land he spends every day for two years ploughing out stones, carting them down the hill to build homes for his children and planting sweet potato. Then, suddenly, the land is appropriated by order of the Party. He complies but his life crumples. Fittingly, Yan gives two dates – one ancient, one modern; “This was in 1966…the first day of the Cold Dew solar term.”
Yan’s uncles struggle both for survival and for inner peace. It is in the stories of First and Fourth Uncle that Yan’s book really comes alive. In simple, direct language, he creates stories that feel both individual and mythic. First Uncle is a dignified figure; Yan imagines him like a commander on the Long March. Like Yan’s father, he works tirelessly to build homes so his children can marry. Every time he returns from selling vegetables in another village, he brings treats for the children. Yet, he has a secret. He is crippled by gambling. He haunts the late-night dens; every time he saves money, he loses it, a strong man blighted by weakness.
Yan and his Fourth Uncle are the characters most affected by modernity. Both want a better life, to escape the grind of the village, to go to the city. Yan as a boy watches with envy the city students, “sent down” in the Revolution to live among the peasants. The students grumble about the boredom of village life, eat the peasants’ food, and then depart, back to the city and its excitement - and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Yan is determined to follow, joining the People’s Army and breaking his father’s heart. He admits he comes home to replenish himself with stories of village life, only to escape again. Then there is Fourth Uncle who has taken job miles away in a cement factory. He slaves night and day as one of the “bowed-heads” (rural peasants who have taken jobs in the city). His village regards him as having escaped to life in the city; he knows, but can’t admit, he is hardly living. He ends up comfortable nowhere.
Perhaps the last of Yan’s elemental figures is Death itself. It is always present. The memoir is in large part a meditation on death and how to prepare to die. When Yan’s father is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he describes at length the process of approaching death. We are constantly walking towards Death, says Yan, but with a terminal illness, Death has started to walk towards you as well.
Yan’s genius is to make these simple stories gripping. There are few books where work is so carefully described. His portrait of his family is loving, tender and, at times, painful. They move between support and betrayal; the betrayal through gambling away family money, leaving the village, abandoning peasant life. These are far more fundamental truths than the politics of the Cultural Revolution.
