China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  XINRAN: I remember you said that your wife supported your enterprise, is that right?

  HUADENG: Yes.

  XINRAN: When did you get to know her and how?

  HUADENG: After Liberation, we were both working in a printer's for a time. Everything was simple then or, as young people would put it now, we were pretty dumb. We saw a lot of each other and our feelings developed.

  She'd had a hard life, and people who knew her told me her mother had bled to death giving birth to her, so her father gave the baby away and ignored her after that. The people who brought her up were very poor too. They just had two pairs of thin trousers worn one over the other to keep them warm in winter. She still hates the New Year, because when she was little, on New Year's Eve when it got dark, she regularly had to go out and pick up other people's discarded rotten vegetable roots to make the New Year's dinner with. One year she got bitten by a wild dog. What she got most enjoyment from in those days was standing outside someone else's house sniffing the good smell of their dinner. And still she's trying to find out what her mother's name was.

  Well, my mother had died young – both being motherless drew us together too – so there were no old people or children for me to look after at home. In those days we earned hardly anything, but as I had no family responsibilities, I could help her out a bit. We didn't get any wedding photographs done, and we didn't do a banquet. Getting married meant we each just got a new outfit, got the marriage certificate, went to the factory to distribute sweeties, and that was it, we were married.

  XINRAN: So did she learn the art of lantern-making from you?

  HUADENG: I did have some influence on her. Actually, she learned it from me on the quiet during the Cultural Revolution. In those days, lanterns belonged to the category of the "Four Olds" which had to be "eliminated" because they were part of a feudal way of life, but we still made lanterns in secret. At New Year, we would take a few small lanterns and sell them in the little alleyways around the Confucian Temple, and no sooner had we gone out with them than the old folks would have every single one off us.

  We weren't allowed to make or sell lanterns during the Cultural Revolution, but I never stopped. Everyone knew how poor my father was and that we had a proper "red" family background, so I wasn't worried anyone was going to "make revolution" against me. When my work unit found out, they just said: "Young Huadeng, how come you're still making lanterns? They're one of the Four Olds, you know, and everyone's smashing the Four Olds and bringing in the Four News. If you're still making lanterns and selling them in the Confucian Temple market, that's dangerous, isn't it?"

  In my lifetime, we've been through so many political movements. All national ones which were no concern of ours, like the 1954 Suppress the Counter-Revolutionaries, the 1957 Anti-Rightist movement, the Cultural Revolution, sending intellectual youth to remote country areas, stuff like that. But I never stopped making lanterns. I never thought that making revolution meant getting rid of festival traditions! I always thought the reason I was brave enough to carry on with my craft in secret was because I wasn't educated, and had no idea what feudalism, capitalism and revisionism meant. I didn't know about Party principles, or what the revolutionary Four News were meant to be. I wasn't the only one who didn't understand that. Most ordinary people had about as little education as I did. In fact, how many of those anti-everything revolutionaries with their movements for this and that understood what it was all about? Making revolution was just a pretext for people to settle private scores. If those movements really had been good for China, then we wouldn't have been poor for so many years. People today wouldn't be so fixated on money, and wouldn't ignore traditional arts like they do. And there wouldn't be people like me, with just my daughter-in-law learning lantern-making from me!

  XINRAN: Do you often have arguments with your wife about the lanterns?

  HUADENG: Yes, often.

  XINRAN: Who wins these arguments?

  HUADENG: She does, of course! Why? Because a man comrade has to give in a bit, otherwise you won't have a good marriage. Because when a woman comrade's temper is up, she's obstinate, she won't back down. I take charge of the technology and the design, and she's responsible for the production. We often have spats, and she sometimes says to me: "We've worked really hard for six years in this workshop, and I've never taken a fen home. If I was your employee, I'd get 500 yuan a month, that's 6,000 a year, and in six years I'd have taken 30,000 yuan home, and you haven't given me a fen!" She's right, you know. At every Dragon Boat Festival, we buy something for each of the workers, even if I'm making a loss and we're not doing any business or earning a fen. At holidays I always buy a gift for everyone, but never buy anything to take home. Why not? Because if I buy something for the workers, it's to win them over, to communicate with them… What I'm saying with that keg of oil or those duck eggs is they have a duty to love me! I treat every fen as if it were a yuan, and every 100 yuan as if it were 10,000, but I do spend money where it matters. We can't depend on the government for our future, or princes or court officials. Our only insurance is ourselves.

  XINRAN: Can I ask you another couple of questions? You can choose whether or not to answer. Since we arrived in China, we've been from Beijing to Guiyang, then to Chengdu, Xinjiang, Gansu, Qingdao, Anhui, now we're in Nanjing, and then we're off to Henan, Beijing, Shanghai, to the area between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, from west to east, and we've heard so many different opinions about this, I'd like to know how you feel. One, are you quite confident about the way society is developing now, or do you have misgivings? And the second question is, what do you personally feel about Chairman Mao? Because we've all seen the rapid pace of urban development in China, the wonderful public buildings, the increasing glamour of China and the rise in the standard of living, but we have also seen how people are worried that our most basic cultural traditions are being neglected. How do you feel about all this?

  HUADENG: We're getting into politics with questions like that, and I don't really want to say anything about it. We're popular artists – that's people's term of respect for us. In fact, we're just lantern-makers, pretty much like beggars. I just make a bit of money with my handicraft. If you're going to talk politics, I don't want to get involved. Who's good, who's bad, I don't want to comment. I feel in my heart that we must take the greatest precautions to protect the traditional art of lantern-making and keep it going. That's the only way it will blossom and produce fruit. If we don't nurture it with enough care, if we neglect it, then it might die out completely.

  XINRAN: So about Chairman Mao, and what he did, what do you personally feel about that? Sometimes, you see, it seems to me that with lots of people now, some will be negative and some will be positive about him. But I feel the reason why he made the kind of mark that he did on Chinese history is that he was shaped by his times. I also feel that we are younger though not as dynamic as you are, so our impressions of him will not be as incisive as yours. What do you feel the generally accepted view of Mao is?

  HUADENG: I'll just say one thing: Chairman Mao was good, and that's all I'm going to say, no more than that. Because that's politics, and we popular artists have our own views on some things. I'm an old man now, so of course there's a lot that I know, but we shouldn't express too many opinions on that sort of thing. the qin huai lantern-makers

  XINRAN: Why do you think Chairman Mao was good?

  HUADENG: When he was alive, there was not so much of a gap between rich and poor, and this was the biggest advantage for ordinary people. There was poverty then, but we lived comfortably. If a worker in a Communist Party enterprise got sick, the trade union had to send them some fruit. Nowadays, there are no Party enterprises. They're all contracted out, here, there and everywhere, and everything's all topsy-turvy. Of course, there are differences in principle between state-run and private enterprises, but state-run enterprises are not the same as they were ten years ago. There are some things that have been swept under the carpet. I'm not going to
say anything else about that today, just that and no more. After all, I still want to carry on working! You big reporters should pay no attention to us ignorant people, we just talk rubbish!

  XINRAN: No, what you've said is really sharp and to the point. I think we all ought to start telling the truth and make the government listen. If no one tells the truth, and no one listens to it, then we Chinese will just carry on being bamboozled by lies, and our society will never improve. I believe that we, the younger generation, need elders like you to tell us where we're going wrong. We need to learn about the past from you, to understand tradition and learn about folk arts from you. That's the only way that we can walk towards the rest of the world without losing our respect for our own culture and national traditions. Don't you agree?

  HUADENG: All young Chinese nowadays think that it's OK to think like you. But just thinking is useless. Soon all those who understand the old culture and arts will be gone, and then if someone wants to study, who will they learn from? Almost all the old artists learned their skills from family members – there are no books and no written records. When they die they'll take everything with them, and then all the traditional culture will go to the grave too. Who's worried about that now? Who cares about it being too late? No one!

  XINRAN: Master Huadeng, I honestly believe that there are other Chinese who feel the same way as you. Otherwise there would be no hope for our national traditions, would there? Among officials, there are quite a few who love our folk culture too. Together we can help the rest get educated in these folk arts. They just need to be pointed in the right direction. They're not gods – they grew up in an era of all politics and no culture – but they're still Chinese and folk arts are an integral part of their lives, they just don't realise it. It's like older people are very sensitive to changes in the weather, the way their joints ache in response to it. But when we're young, we don't care about changes in the weather.

  HUADENG: You're quite right in what you say, I'm just afraid it may be too late. Time doesn't wait for anyone, and old artists can't wait until they're a hundred! Now come and see how we make lanterns!

  ***

  After I left Huadeng, I felt, once again, quite emotional about what I had heard and seen. After touring China's Yangtze River region, I realised that almost every single Chinese person we met was as dedicated as Mr Huadeng, fought like this, and felt this kind of sorrow. Like many Chinese, Huadeng had heard too many lies, too much boasting and empty talk to believe that there was hope for his culture. That is what hurts me most. As a Chinese person, the hardest thing to accept is that we do not believe each other.

  While we were investigating Qin Huai lanterns, we also interviewed the master lantern-maker and his pupil who had been brought together by local government cadres: Li Guisheng and Gu Yeliang.

  The interviews were conducted at their premises, an artisan-built courtyard in a typical period style. We made our way through a lane full of washing hung out to dry, suddenly emerging into a small courtyard of about a hundred square metres, flanked by buildings on three sides and a wall on the fourth. The buildings were of the squat and rudimentary construction traditional for craftsmen's workshops. From the main gateway it was impossible to make out anything in the darkened interiors, and it was only the roar of the electric grinder and the fan, and the chatter and laughter of women, that told us that there were people at work in there. Under a hundred-year-old tree in the centre of the courtyard a small mountain of half-finished water-lily lanterns reposed in the shade. We set up our interview equipment in front of the eaves from which hung the finished lanterns, where the blazing sunshine not only provided us with sufficient light but also proved such an effective "sweat producer" that after a few hours we were all drenched in sweat again. Even our interviewee, sitting before the camera's lens, was too preoccupied with constantly mopping the sweat trickling into his eyes to bother about his "media image". Li Guisheng was a very correct old man, with a very correct way of sitting and speaking, and an even more "correct" way of expressing his views. The huge generational differences in the feelings of master and pupil about lantern-making were very clear from their answers to our questions – not so much a contrast as an indication that they came from two different eras.

  We were concerned that Mr Li, who was nearly ninety, would find the sweltering heat unbearable, so we limited our questions to him to checking historical facts we had turned up in our research and to oral traditions of lantern-making in the Jiangnan region. On the current state of lantern-making, the old man did not beat about the bush.

  ***

  LI: Earlier generations, and that includes us, always treated lantern-making as a way of keeping body and soul together, a skill to be respected, and a technique which we competed to perfect and the next generation would take that forward. Not like today when lanterns have been made so ostentatious. Now, if a craft is treated as technology then it can be helped by science and won't be divorced from its time. Ostentation is a matter of "face", and craftsmanship and tradition can be destroyed by "face". Haven't we already destroyed so much? But now people without skills are using "face" to put on a pretence that they've got skills.

  So many young people now look down on tradition, and regard crafts as the minnows of the business world. In my view, it would be truer to say that they just don't understand tradition. It's scary to think that a people don't understand their own cultural heritage. If someone has spent their whole life working at something they don't like, it's as if they've been living in a prison, isn't it? Even if you earn money from it, you've just been using it – in today's smart phrase – to build yourself a gilded cage.

  I don't understand computers, I can't drive a car, and I've never been in a plane, but I haven't allowed the art of my forebears to be destroyed. I've carried on doing what my elders passed down to me. I've shown the age-old tradition of lantern-making to all those people who understand computers, can drive cars and are always hopping on and off planes.

  I don't have the money to buy myself a gold coffin, but others can go to heaven taking with them memories of lanterns which I made for them!

  ***

  Listening to old Mr Li's words, I reflected that as children we had all been educated by the Communist Party and "tamed" into sacrificing ourselves for our nation. Why had this education never produced the tenacity of this man's love for his country and his people? Why had the young generation, brought up to put the public good before private profit and others before themselves, turned out so selfish? Surely five thousand years of popular culture could withstand fifty years of brainwashing and a few hundred years of Western gods?

  Li Guisheng's "officially arranged" pupil, Gu Yeliang, had apparently bucked the current trend for money worship. Gu, a man in his forties, told us his story.

  ***

  GU: I started to learn lantern-making with another master at the age of eight. At the Chinese New Year, I would go with my family to set up a stall and sell the lanterns. At the beginning of the eighties, when the Confucian Temple lantern market first reopened, traders gathered on one street to sell them. The stall spaces were not fixed, so everyone arrived the night before to grab a space for their stall the next day. On New Year's Eve I took it in turns with the family to do my stint. I could see other people having family parties while I spent all night looking after the stall in the market. But that year, our family made 500 or 600 yuan from selling lanterns.

  My grandfather taught me a nursery rhyme that was popular then: "Come out and play with a lantern, kid. Never mind your red and green party clothes, just come with a red candle! " My father also used to say that when he was little, children got just as much pleasure out of lanterns as they did from firecrackers, new clothes and new hats. Every year, the excitement of those dazzling lanterns made them happy for ages. But nowadays, old Nanjingers sigh sadly: "Every year the different varieties of lanterns get fewer!"

  People don't realise that there are twenty-one different steps in making even a simp
le water-lily lantern. You work for a whole year, and you don't earn much from it. I come from a lantern-making family, and I started to learn at a very young age, but now it's got to my son's generation, and they don't want to learn! A few years ago, most of the paper lantern-makers lived in the area to the east and west of the Confucian Temple main gate. There were about 260 of us. We all worked together, and were friends, and met up socially. We were moved on because of redevelopment, and now we're all scattered. Who's going to spend thirty or forty minutes on a bus carrying their bags and packages to meet up? In the whole of Nanjing there are still 110 or so people who can make lanterns, most of them in their forties, but there are fewer and fewer lanterns made with traditional bamboo strips and paper and paste. The market is full of blown plastic, factory-made lanterns. There used to be more than three hundred kinds of lanterns, but now there are only around twenty or so left. Only artists in their eighties and nineties know how to make lion, aeroplane and unicorn lanterns. We've known for a long time that the skills might die out. I only employ twenty or so lantern-makers here.

  ***

  But Mr Gu, who is also a People's Congress representative, is like millions of Chinese of his generation in that he doesn't spend his time complaining that things are not what they used to be. He thinks anything is possible, and he doesn't believe it's too late. He wants to set up a museum to showcase the whole range of Qin Huai lantern art and to have a big lantern festival to nurture the tradition of folk lanterns. He also wants to provide training in lantern-making. "If there are people out of work, they just need to be willing to learn, and we would be happy to teach them the secrets of making lanterns."