(Also published on LARB's China Blog)
In the remote mountains of Yunnan Province, China, a middle-aged
European ecologist gave up his high-level international program manager
job and made his home with a local woman. Together, they set forth to
reestablish the rainforests destroyed by rubber tree plantations,
cultivated a garden — a seed bank — that “was home to more species than
all of Germany,” reintroduced indigenous plant species to China, and
homeschooled two bright young children with knowledge, poise and manners
belying their age. In 2010, the extraordinary life of the ecologist,
along with the draft of an unconventional paper that could “be of
enormous value to mankind,” was cut short by a heart attack.
This story about Josef Margraf, written by journalist Jonathan Watts,
is not a news report or profile but rather an essay, moving for both
Watts’ own introspection and his sketch of Margraf’s life. I read it in
the anthology Unsavory Elements —Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China,
in which editor Tom Carter has assembled 28 short contributions by a
variety of expat writers. I had opened the book with the intention of
browsing through it quickly. Though I was curious about how expats live
in China, and why there are so many of them now, as a Chinese writer
with a certain cynicism, I did not expect to find anything truly
surprising. But surprised I was, and my own stereotypical presumptions
stand corrected.
In 1971, when I was a middle school student in the city of Chongqing,
recruiters dressed in military uniforms from the faraway Yunnan
Production and Construction Corps — a more attractive name, I suppose,
than “rubber plantations” to teenagers at the time — arrived at my
campus and called on students to join them “guarding the frontier and
cultivating the borderland.” Many of us, me included, applied with
youthful enthusiasm, and almost everyone I knew who applied got their
wish. I was spared because I was under-aged and also because some
insightful adults, who viewed higher education as more important than
planting rubber trees, stood in my way. In all, about 100,000 middle
school students were collected from the cities of Beijing, Shanghai,
Chongqing, Chengdu, and Kunming and sent to labor in Yunnan’s rubber
plantations. The collective name for those young people was “Zhiqing,”
or “Educated Youth.” Seven years of hardship and many tragic stories
later, in the winter of 1978-79, those Zhiqing launched a spontaneous
mass rally that has since been termed the “big return-to-city storm,”
which eventually did bring them home. By then I, as one of the lucky
few, had entered my second year in university, but my middle school
friends who went to Yunnan missed their chance not only for university,
but even for a high school education.
I had thought that the wasted youth of my 100,000 contemporaries
qualified as the biggest damage caused by the rubber plantations, and
that an end had been put to the practice in early 1979. Not until
reading Watts’ chapter did I realize with a shock that the rubber
plantations have been expanding during China’s recent economic boom and
have gone on to become one of “China’s greatest ecological disasters.”
The invasive species eats away at the region’s fertility and diversity,
changes weather conditions and rainfall, and threatens to wipe out
China’s only tropical rainforest. Many friends from my youth, through
their goodwill and hard work, had unknowingly contributed to the
disaster while also bringing short-term benefits to China’s industries.
In his essay titled “Invasive Species,” Watts also points out that,
ironically, it was Europeans who brought rubber trees and monocultural
practices to China more than a century ago. As a European himself, Josef
Margraf’s effort thus could be viewed as “looking to the future by
making up for the past wrongs.” “I think Josef has achieved more than
any foreigner I had met,” says Watts, who also wonders loudly, “weren’t
we too part of a kind of invasive species?”
Nowadays, there are over one million foreigners living in China,
“many of whom are in effect economic refugees,” says Tom Carter in his
introduction. The exponential growth of foreign residents compared to
the late 1980s, when I first met my American husband in Chengdu, alone
illustrates the now tried and true cliché “look how much China has
changed!” Chinese readers of my generation, however, might also find in
the book more than a few things that are unchanged, sometimes in
unexpected corners. Dominic Stevenson, who fits more into the category
of adventurer than economic refugee, left a comfortable life in Bangkok
for China, but ended up spending two years in a Shanghai prison for
being a hash smuggler along the ancient Silk Road. Stevenson’s essay,
titled “Thinking Reports,” provides a rare glance at life as a foreign
prisoner. A bizarrely familiar scene described in the chapter is
probably unfamiliar to today’s young generation of Chinese: Stevenson
and his cellmates are required to write “thought reports,” a maddening
practice prevalent in the Cultural Revolution years that had “reformed”
more than a few otherwise noble men into despicable informants betraying
their friends. The suspense of Stevenson’s story is thus how he, a
liberal-minded foreigner, will react to such a request. I can only hope
the practice of “thought reporting” preserved in a prison is not going
to reappear in Chinese society at large, a dreadful outlook no longer
unthinkable under Xi Jinping’s rule.
But I might be too pessimistic. Simon Winchester takes my emotional
ride with the expat experiences to a high point in his epilogue, where
he is stuck in the void of western China’s desert alone with his dead
car, toying with the prospect of perishing. “Except.” Following this
emphatic pause is a cellphone signal, and his rescue because of it. “The
Chinese build their infrastructure well these days, and one of the
first things they have created in making their new nationwide
transportation system — long before finishing the roads — is a cell
phone network.” I might not agree with the author’s conclusion that
China has become so successful today “precisely because it [is] not a
casually planned society any more,” but that does not stop me from being
in a celebratory mood when reading about a man’s life saved by China’s
modern telecommunication infrastructure. This despite my own support for
a neighborhood protest against the building of another cellular tower
in our Boston suburb.
While my contradictory attitude might be explained away by the Chinese adage This is one time, that was another,
Graham Earnshaw’s chapter “Playing in the Gray” tells a story eerily
reminiscent of an earlier time. In 1872, a British businessman named
Ernest Major launched one of the first and most prominent Chinese
newspapers, Shen Pao, in Shanghai, which went on to lay the
foundation for modern Chinese newspapers and continued publication for
77 years, until the Communists took over Shanghai in May 1949. Half a
century later, in 1998, Earnshaw, again a Briton, again in Shanghai,
founded “the first independent weekly English-language newspaper to be
produced in Shanghai since the communist takeover in 1949.” “Sure, it
was illegal. It had no publication license, its content was not reviewed
by the Propaganda Bureau ahead of publication, and we had no right to
print or distribute. But we did it anyway.” This fascinating experience
led Earnshaw to believe China is a place where “nothing is allowed but
everything is possible.”
Perhaps that is one of the major attractions of the Middle Kingdom. In an interview with Business Insider,
Tom Carter was asked, “Do you think that the influence of foreigners on
China is a good thing?” and he answered, “All things considered, I
think China is more of an influence on the expats who live here than we
are on it…” Circling back to the story about Josef Margraf, the
influences work both ways, and every person has a different story to
tell. I ended up reading through Unsavory Elements page by
page, story by story, on the train to work in the morning and, when I
was lucky enough to find a seat, on the way home in the evening as well.
It is an uneven book, as might be expected of any anthology. There are a
few stories that come across as condescending, sentimental, or dull.
But the majority of them are captivating and, as a whole, the book is
unexpectedly wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and entertaining.
