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Jonathan Chatwin

My Old Homeby Orville SchellPantheon
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.


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In My Old Home, academic Orville Schell turns to fiction to make sense of China’s Cultural Revolution

Red Guards brandish the copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book at a rally in Beijing, in 1966. Photo: AFP

My Old Home by Orville Schell. Photo: Handout

Forbidden Memory explores the role of Tibetan Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution

The cover image from Forbidden Memory, Tibet During The Cultural Revolution, by Tsering Woeser. Photo: Handout

Handout image taken on August 19, 1966, when a rally was held at the PeopleÕs Stadium in Lhasa, which had been created on the site of the Polingka, formerly a popular picnic resort for the lite. The man speaking from the podium in figure 12 is Zhang Guohua, the most powerful political figure in Tibet at the time: he was both the commander of the Tibet Military Region and the Secretary of the Party Committee of theTAR [AJAY ADDS: Tibet Autonomous Region]. In front of the Mao portrait, beneath the central banner and directly facing the speakerÕs podium, we can just make out two photographers. One is wearing a dark jacket and peaked cap, and the otherÑa Tibetan cameraman from the Tibet office of the Central Newsreel Production StudioÑhastwo cameras strapped across his body. A photographer from the Tibet Daily, also with two cameras, stands just to the left of Zhang Guohua. In figure 13, the two large boards to the left of the Mao portraits say, ÒLong live the Proletarian Cultural Revol

Handout image. The picture was taken from the spot used by my father (TSERING WOESER) for his photograph of the Monlam Chenmo festivities in 1964, two years before the Cultural Revolution began (figs. 3, 297). He used the same spot for his photograph of the front entrance of the Jokhang during the attack by the Red Guards on August 24, 1966, in which he showed Red Guards hoisting a portrait of Mao on the Jokhang roof (figs. 38, 298). I chose the same month and day to take my photograph in 2012, forty-six years later. Only a few Tibetans were doing full-length prostrations in front of the temple that day, because entry to the center of the old city of Lhasa, where the Jokhang is situated, had been restricted after the double self-immolation protest just outside the temple on May 27 that year. The two self-immolators had come from the eastern Tibetan areas outside the tar, so after their protest the authorities had shut off entry to the city and the region to all Tibetans from those area

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Henry Tang meets the media at the M+ on Monday. Photo: Sam Tsang

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Protesters display sheets of plain white paper during a protest in a shopping mall in Hong Kong on July 6, after the government warned that the use of the slogan, “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times”, risked flouting the new national security law. Photo: EPA-EFE

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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



Academic Orville Schell turns to fiction with new novel because ‘so much of what animates [China] is almost impossible to convey in non-fiction.


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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

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