Eight Chinese lessons - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brian Castro
CHINESE LESSON VIII: My mother was not a formally educated person. She was born before the First World War and lived through another. She recently died at the age of ninety-two. She learned everything through personal experience. I do not even want to imagine what she went through under the three years and eight months of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, which began on Christmas Day, 1941. For many years after, she lived with a radio, both as an article of furniture and as a portable contraption, against her ear. It was her companion, her security blanket which disseminated the insecurity of the present moment.
Following my father's lead, I may even have patronised her because of this atavistic behaviour. Radio Hong Kong carried the BBC news. Little did we know she was always attuned to the world, though she hardly ever offered an opinion. Then one day she said to me that what she heard on the BBC World Service was really all about China. ‘China will go through much more than the rest of the world,' she said, ‘step by step.' I thought she had reached the foothills of dementia. But now I think she was right. It was a reminder of absence.
China had always been the blindspot of the West. The West is now playing at catch-up. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his fragment entitled ‘Chinese Curios' in the collection One-Way Street, ‘Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.' Transcription is the key to China's enigma: the transmission of personal experience in the encoding of culture. Where there is an official forgetting, the historical practice of experiencing transcription is diverted into rediscovering visions – in a totally anachronistic way. Plus ça change. So it is important to dream first, without first being contaminated by experience. That, however, may be an extremely dangerous practice.
My mother always knew Greenwich Mean Time. If this is China's century then it will be timely and timeless. But that's a cliché. There will be no going back, and there will surely be divergences from a linear path. Dead Europe and its museums won't count for anything and never again will Western colonialism make a return. But will China's time be itself altered by an uncontrollable reality? Its own colonial gate-keeping? Its notions of ‘purity'? And where will poetry be, or the literary dreaming which interpolates resistance? Will there be a return of the repressed?
Incidentally, my father never got the job putting down factory workers. When he arrived in a new country (in Australia, perennially ten years younger – at his funeral I didn't know what dates to put on his gravestone), the first thing he did was to join a trade union. I suppose this was what China had taught him. He learnt to walk the road on foot – in other people's shoes. History lessons were never reliable, but the freedom to dream led you across all borders. ♦