Last August I received an invitation from Peking University, Beijing-a rather odd combination of names I thought-to speak at an international biographical conference which was to be held towards the end of the year at Fuzhou University (Fuzhou being the capital city of Fujian Province in south-east China). The letter was signed by the "Director of the World Auto/Biography Centre," Dr Zhao Baisheng, in the English department of Peking University.
I had been to China once before, in the summer of 1993, and was curious to see how things had changed. At the beginning of September, I replied saying that in principle I would be delighted to accept. There followed over seven weeks of silence, presumably as they debated whether to persist with the conference after 11th September.
Then suddenly, in late October, the silence was shattered by an artillery of e-mails, air-letters and other messages. Originally I had been politely urged to ask any questions I liked: now I was the target for volleys of questions myself. What was my name, my title, my sex, my age, my profession, institution, nationality and so on? I felt somewhat disconcerted by this, having assumed that my hosts knew who I was before asking me to join them. There was also the minefield that lay between me and my visa. Among other documents, I would need a business letter confirming my financial responsibility, and an official letter stamped by a local government office or the ministry of foreign affairs in China. I stared at this maze of "information" with mounting helplessness. Then I sent off an SOS to the British Council.
While various British Council offices kindly laboured over the bureaucracy of my journey, I worked at my "keynote address" which, I was informed, would be translated before I arrived. I was advised in its preparation to "follow the MLA Style Manual," but not being an academic such advice was meaningless to me. Besides, there was very little time for such adornments. I was to e-mail an abstract of my address at once, and forward my completed typescript as quickly as possible. One night, while I was grappling with all this, I had a dream in which I stood before a large crowd in what looked like Tiananmen Square, and announced: "my address is 85 St Marks Road." There was immense applause.
My journey to Beijing was complicated by having first to fly to Dublin as one of the judges for the 2002 Impac Literary Award (a newish and generous international literary award with prize money of ?100,000. Submissions this year have been made by libraries in 38 countries, but none I noticed from China.) From Dublin I flew back to Heathrow, from Heathrow to Paris, and then on to Beijing.
On my first visit to China I had travelled with Doris Lessing and my wife, Margaret Drabble. That was a VIP trip, hosted by the Chinese Writers Association and involving translators, editors of magazines and publishing houses. We were interviewed on television and in newspapers, and we made presentations of our books to universities-at least Doris and Maggie did. My books never arrived. This is a problem I have encountered in many countries, a problem that afflicts non-fiction writers whose works are shelved not under their own names but under the names of their subjects. Look under H and there is no sighting my lives of Strachey or Shaw. I recommend travelling biographers to pick subjects whose names have at least an opening syllable identical to their own, and to set an example I am myself contemplating a life of Richard Holmes.
Although I shared the platform with Doris and Maggie-as together we attempted to describe the various aspects of contemporary British literature-my bookless condition had convinced the Chinese authorities that I was no author but probably some government official, perhaps from the celebrated Scotland Yard, appointed to keep a sharp eye on these two wild lady novelists. As such, I was not particularly convincing, rising to my feet at the conclusion of various banquets after an embarrassingly inadequate performance with my chopsticks-my clothes littered with food-to make a final speech of thanks on behalf of the three of us, only to find as I sat down that the banquet was only halfway through.
During that 1993 visit we were escorted everywhere-to the Forbidden City, the Beijing Opera, the Great Wall, the Buried City at Xian, the Shanghai Academy of Social Science-by a brilliant young translator. She was especially excited to meet the film director of Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou, whom we had asked to see.
But this visit was quite different. I was on my own, free to walk unescorted wherever I wished. There is a popular notion in the west that the Chinese people are sullen, censored and inscrutable. But in the towns at least, I found the opposite: the streets are full of vivacious crowds of friendly people, some of them singing as they bicycle fluently through the dense traffic, many of them joined in laughter. Even political jokes are allowed.
One change from 1993 that particularly struck me was the groups of young men and women flirting, kissing, arms round each other, in the streets and parks. This may be an unintended consequence of the "little emperor" policy: the law which has restricted every family to one child (especially in the big towns). You can see these single children everywhere, dressed in wonderfully coloured clothes and attended by their loving parents. Overall, the policy must have had a huge psychological impact on a peasant country used to big families in which individual freedom was not possible and people had to conform. Now children are brought up to feel important and this may soon lead to a generation of more demanding adults. Another un-intended consequence of the one child policy is that it has raised the status of girls: if you cannot keep trying to have boys then you lavish your attention, money and education on your girl. This seems to be creating a sort of feminism with Chinese characteristics.
My hunch is that the family restriction policy will not last much longer. Women will no longer tolerate this limit on their freedom. Already the government has opened up a debate on this subject, airing the view that "talented" couples might be allowed two babies. But many people believe that such an elitist policy is not going to work and that women will eventually win the day.
From a distance, Beijing is beginning to look like any large American city. The air quality is better than it was and, as the Olympic Games approach, will get better still. Some older blocks of flats will be taken down before the games and people moved elsewhere. Increasingly, money rules. The news that China is entering the World Trade Organisation is greeted as a great step forward. All the experts affirm this on television and in the newspapers. Privately, some people appear to be keeping an open mind. Perhaps this move to become more integrated with the rest of the world will lead to fewer restrictions on foreign travel. But the strength of the Chinese economy has partly depended upon its isolation and its relatively low wages. The government is rich; the people are not. There is also a widening gap, partly aggravated by the coming of supermarkets with their lower food prices, between farmers and townspeople.
We were advised in 1993 not to mention Tibet. This time almost everything-even Aids-seemed up for discussion. Taiwan can be a sore point. But I sensed a feeling of confidence that it will one day be part of China again. What the authorities dislike, as with Tibet, is what they regard as foreign interference and the placing of such matters on the world's political agenda, particularly in the US.
One day, losing my way in Beijing, I came across some soldiers idling and then drilling on a parade ground. They seemed to me like the security officials at airports-unsmiling, dour, with faces like machines and quite unlike the active, vocal, taxi-drivers and shopkeepers I had been mixing with. They had the unsatisfied, wooden appearance of people who are unemployed or under-employed, and who would welcome a little action.
On the following day, I saw on television an interview-confession with a woman who had been sentenced to three years for being a member of the religious cult Falun Gong. She had first been tempted into this "alternative" way of life while living in the US. What she had actually done wrong was unclear to me. But the confession itself was quite sophisticated, admitting the attractions of the belief while condemning its self-destructive excesses. Religion, it appears, is fine when seen as part of the past. But any supernatural philosophy is still regarded as a potential threat. The woman interviewee was rather attractive and well-dressed-almost an advertisement for Chinese prison life. But it showed how much, and how little, may be tolerated in China.
The US is not very popular in China and nor is Islam. I found people sincerely regretting that the events of 11th September had happened but adding it was understandable that it had happened in New York and Washington. And yet China needs the US. It must sup with the devil because he is so damn wealthy. Many Chinese students would like to go there and get rich themselves. There are many more students studying international business, computer skills and the magic realism of the virtual world than studying literature and the arts.
The teaching sometimes reflects the still authoritarian nature of the country: the professors profess, the students like secretaries accept dictation, and there is little live dialogue between them. On my first visit I had asked the students to write down any questions they wanted to ask while I was speaking-to avoid their shyness in getting up and questioning me in a foreign language. But when lecturing at Peking University this time I omitted to do this, and so had to initiate a dialogue by asking them questions. Did they write diaries and let anyone else read them? Did they keep letters they were sent or was it all fax and e-mail now. They responded eagerly and I discovered that more than one student kept two diaries: one to be shown to others, the other strictly for herself. This seemed to reflect the dual nature of Chinese society very well.
The international conference itself-reached by a seven-hour long, hectically-crowded train journey, followed by a coach trip through the night-was an extraordinary event. A large contingent of American scholars had been invited and had been keen to come. But following 11th September they began to cancel. One felt that he could not fly because he was Jewish; another explained that he had two children, and so on, until by early November only five of them remained. Then this gang of five cancelled because the others were not coming. This was perhaps understandable, but it was also deeply disappointing for the organisers of the conference, who could have been forgiven for seeing it as a victory for the terrorists.
Where the Americans led, others followed-in other words they stayed at home. Eventually, I was left as the only participant who actually flew in from abroad, though various foreign scholars who already had teaching posts in China were drafted in to fill some gaps. The conference, which covered Arabic, Russian and Latin American literature, was certainly international in its subject matter.
As the innocent abroad, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and flattery. But it was an intimidating experience. I found myself, without a translator, giving the first speech to an audience of some 400 students and scholars in a magnificent, tent-like auditorium. Then, a little later, I was on the eighth floor of a hotel co-chairing a seminar on language acquisition, the interplay of fact and fiction in the novels of Jeanette Winterson, and the overlapping of pathology, eulogy and autobiography in the non-fiction work of the Australian poet Peter Rose.
Almost everything that happened took me by surprise. The "roundtable session" was conducted from 12 bamboo gondolas skimming along a river in the dramatic landscape of Wuyi Mountain; and the "global perspectives" session took place in a night club, with much singing and dancing. I remember being told by Kazuo Ishiguro that (in the interests of furthering my career) I should become more like Mick Jagger. If only I had taken his advice, how I would have shone at global perspectives.
It is English pragmatism, rather than English irony that most amuses the Chinese. My agitation at finding I was booked out on a plane that did not exist added greatly to the jollity of the conference. After all, what else was this but a piece of magic realism, or devastating politeness, symbolising their wish to keep me forever in China.
Before I left, I found out something about "Auto /Biography." Zha Baisheng, the director of its "world centre" is a vastly energetic, well-read, not unambitious scholar who has been to Harvard and knows about the rise of this mysterious genre around the academic world, from the University of Hawaii to the University of Huddersfield. It has little connection with literature or the writings of Aubrey, Ackerley and Ackroyd. In Britain, Auto/Biography is a journal produced by the British Sociological Association and is largely concerned with the changing nature of identity in the modern world.
Chinese universities still have difficulty getting hold of the books they need and are as nervous of copyright as they were on my first visit. Their knowledge of foreign publications is patchy. They know perhaps too much about the Booker Prize (I write as one who was on its management committee for eight years) and nothing of the Impac Literary Award, for which their novels in translation are actually eligible. But they are far more technologically advanced than they were, and than I am. It seems a miracle that they were able to contact me at all by e-mail when I do not even own a computer.
