Meihong xu biography of michael

The relationship between China and the United States is extraordinarily complex, seemingly made up of equal parts hope, racism, & misunderstanding.  The hope is a product of over a century's worth of Protestant missionaries trying to bring the Good Word to an enormous population of potential converts and of millions of Chinese immigrants finding economic opportunity here in the States.  The racism too flows both ways, with each nation's people believing the other's to be barbarians.  The mutual misunderstanding comes from myriad sources, but probably has its greatest impetus in the most fundamental difference between the two cultures, the difference which paradoxically serves as the main attractant and repellent between the two : American openness and Chinese reserve.   In a sense, what each values in the other is what it has least of itself.  The image of the "Ugly American," though partly a caricature,  is also fair to the extent that it's a product of our inability to keep our opinions, ideas, and feelings to ourselves.  Meanwhile, the competing image of the "inscrutable Oriental," though freighted with racist overtones, reflects American inability to understand people who don't "share" as much of themselves as we do.  It's easy to see then that two peoples who are so different would find each other intriguing.  Daughter of China plumbs these themes, both on a personal and a political level, and, though a little uneven, serves as a valuable look at one Chinese woman's confrontation with East and West.

Meihong Xu was raised in the rural village of Lishi.  A devoted Maoist from an early age, even to the point of allowing political suspicions to color her perceptions of her father and a devoted Aunt, she joined the People's Liberation Army in 1981 and was chosen to become one of the "twelve pandas," a dozen young women selected for an elite intelligence unit and sent for special training at the prestigious Institute for International Relations in Nanjing.  Once there however, she became a disciple of an at least mildly  pro-Western officer, known as "the Coffee General" for his Western ways, including a preference for coffee over tea.  He hoped to open an institute which would immerse trainees in American culture and so Meihong was sent in 1988 to the Center for Chinese and American Studies, a joint venture of Johns Hopkins and Nanjing University.  There, in addition to her studies, she was asked by a friend in the Ministry of State Security to keep an eye on Larry Engelmann, an American instructor they suspected of spying.

In accordance with her assignment she cultivated a relationship with Engelmann, but soon found him too naive and trusting too conceivably be an intelligence operative.  Moreover, his innocence, good humor and emotional openness was so appealing to her that she found herself becoming enamored with him.  Engelmann, for his part, lonely, unhappy, and thousands of miles from home, fell in love with her.   But their nascent relationship was abruptly ended when Chinese Intelligence ordered Engelmann out of the country and arrested and interrogated Xu, apparently motivated in large part by the desire of certain elements within the government to use her to get at the Coffee General and other pro-West officials.  Xu ended up being expelled from the PLA and sent back to her village, to work as a peasant.  But she eventually got word to Engelmann in the States and the remainder of the book details their efforts to get her out of China.

Though the story is billed a romance, there's an awkward unreality to the relationship between Xu and Engelmann, who seem at times to be in love with the idea of each other more than with the actual person.  But the political portrait of modern China more than makes up for any weaknesses in the love angle.  Meihong Xu's journey from committed daughter of the revolution to doubt-filled young adult to San Jose, California makes for really compelling reading.  One of the most unfortunate aspects of the American-Chinese relationship, and this I think is mostly a product of latent racism,  is that we in the West do not take seriously the mass murder, repression, and aggression of China's Communist government.  We are all too willing to minimize their crimes, or excuse them altogether, as an unfortunate byproduct of an understandable nationalist reaction to decades of Western imperialism.

It would be better for all concerned, but especially for the people of China, if we in the West understood the reality of life there better.  The best way to develop this understanding is for a dissident literary tradition to emerge, as it did in the Soviet Union.  This has begun to happen with books like this one, the works of Anchee Min (other than the unfortunate Becoming Madame Mao), and other authors like Ha Jin.  Most significantly, Philip Short's great recent biography of Mao goes a long way to revising the largely benign view of him, and the recently released Tiananmen Papers may prove a turning point similar to the publication of Solzhenitsyn's devastating Gulag Archipelago.

The ultimate value of this book then lies not in its love story, which is charming enough though ultimately not terribly compelling (to anyone but the participants); it lies instead in its revelatory portrait of one young woman's experiences in Red China, a nightmare world no less repressive and monstrous than the USSR.  In this regard it is invaluable and I recommend it to anyone who still harbors the belief that Maoist China has been qualitatively different from any of the old Iron Curtain regimes.