Review | In My Old Home, academic Orville Schell turns to fiction to make sense of China’s Cultural Revolution
- Orville Schell structures the book as a bildungsroman that follows protagonist Little Li’s journey from innocence to experience
- Historical interjections and a commitment to translation give the sense of an expert unwilling to entirely yield his mantle to his story and characters
My Old Home
by Orville Schell
Pantheon
In the hours before dawn on August 18, 1966, the vast expanse of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square began to fill with people. By the time Mao Zedong walked onto the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, clad in an ill-fitting People’s Liberation Army uniform, there were more than a million crammed into the square and the streets around it.
Lin Biao gave a speech to the assembled crowd in which he cited Chairman Mao as the “greatest genius” of the age and encouraged the assembled Red Guards to destroy the four olds: the ideas, culture, customs and habits of the past. This first mass rally of the Cultural Revolution initiated the worst violence of what became known as Hong Bayue – Red August – during which many thousands of people were tortured and killed in Beijing by Red Guards.
“The screams of the beaten and dying made sleep impossible,” wrote American sinologist David Kidd of that terrible month. “By the end […] the dead were piled so high that they could not be burned fast enough.”
The story of China’s Cultural Revolution has been well told in non-fiction: autobiographical works such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991) and Ma Bo’s Blood Red Sunset (1995) have become bestsellers, while one could fill a decent-sized bookcase with English-language historical works on the era.
Historian Jonathan Spence observed that the Cultural Revolution is one of those rare historical events that seems to make less sense with the passage of time, and despite all the factual writing that has been produced on the decade from 1966 to Mao’s death, in 1976, it remains a confounding period to understand both in terms of personal motivations and the political and cultural forces at play.
Orville Schell is best known as an academic and writer of studies of China such as Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders (1994) and Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (2013). In My Old Home, Schell turns to fiction to tell the story of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The author has himself answered the question implicitly posed by this turn towards the creative mode, commenting that his decision to write a novel resulted from a belief that “so much of what animates [China] is almost impossible to convey in non-fiction”.
Schell’s novel begins on an overheated evening during Red August, with the arrival of Red Guards at the courtyard home of Li Tongshu, a professor of classical music at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. His 14-year-old son, Li Wende, watches as they force a dunce cap on his father’s head, before dragging him to a table and hacking at his hands with a meat cleaver. Thus begins the young Li’s experience of the Cultural Revolution.
“Little Li” will later be “sent down” to a remote party outpost called Yak Springs, in Qinghai province, where he experiences the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution at a distant remove; gradually he comes to find solace in the sublime landscape that surrounds him and the people who inhabit it. This is but the first phase of Li’s education, however. His story will eventually lead well beyond the strictures of the Cultural Revolution.
Schell’s book is fairly conventionally structured as a bildungsroman – a novel tracing the youthful journey from innocence to experience. Unlike the transcendent books of this genre, however – David Copperfield, for example, or To Kill a Mockingbird – My Old Home struggles to develop Little Li as a suitably nuanced and compelling protagonist. Schell seems interested in the character mainly as a vector to explore the generic emotions of adolescence and young adulthood and, more prominently, the historical forces that swirl around him.
Still taboo in mainland China: Li Zhensheng’s Cultural Revolution
Sections of the novel – particularly those in Yak Springs – are engaging, but just as the reader is beginning to view the specifics of the fictional world through the eyes of Little Li, Schell will zoom out into a didactic aside on history or politics, leading to a feeling of a book stuck uncomfortably between two modes. Even more disruptive of the flow of the novel is the insistence on providing bracketed translations of Chinese terms. This extends beyond proper nouns to whole phrases, meaning barely a page goes by without interruptions of this sort:
“His evident aversion to physical labor earned him the nickname ‘Comrade Inaction’ (无为同志), a play on the notion of ‘nonaction’ (无为) that the classical sage Laozi (老子) had enshrined millennia ago.”
Both the historical interjections and unyielding commitment to translation are symptoms of an overall sense of an expert unwilling to entirely yield his mantle in the service of his story and characters.
My Old Home is rich in historical detail and a diverting excursion through an undeniably dramatic era, but it never manages to attain the immersive richness its form truly demands.
