I switched to a picture of a crucifix with the anguished, dying Christ nailed to it in my PowerPoint presentation to my erudite audience at the University of Engineering and Science in Shanghai. “I also grew up in that boarding school with this image firmly planted in my subconscious.”
I recited to my listeners the Lord’s Prayer, a copy of it now on the theatre screen behind me. “Every night we knelt at our beds and said this prayer. Every night. Monday to Friday we had communion every morning in the school chapel. Every Sunday, both in the morning and the evening, from the age of seven I was compelled to attend the services and took communion. ‘Take. Eat. This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you.’
“I remember being appalled as a child that I may be eating this strange Lord’s body and sipping his blood.”
There were muffled guffaws in my audience. “You mean it was like cannibalism?” said some wit. More laughter. I let it subside. The majority of Chinese people today grow up with no sense of religion. Some, particularly the elders, do practise tai chi in parks every morning. Though no longer a Christian or any kind of religious person, I was not trying to be disrespectful. That queasiness in church is what I experienced as a child.
I was sorely tempted to bring up the topic of Chairman Mao and how he is still deified — there seems no other word for it — among many of the common people. Indeed, many university students still regard him as a hero who set the nation free. I had recently read In His Mind a Million Bold Warriors by Mao loyalist Yen Chang-li. It was a memoir about the life of Chairman Mao during the communist campaign of 1947 and 1948 against Chiang Kai Shek. The copy I have is the original 1972 imprint, so it was published in China during the Cultural Revolution. The similarity between the depiction of Mao and Jesus in the Gospels is astonishing. Every word written about Chairman Mao is bathed in an eerie adulation.
The following passage reminds me of some of the gospel passages that describe Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances. Mao, for security reasons in the civil war, sometimes anonymously moved from cave to cave in the mountains around Xi’an:
The telephone bell rang.
The telephone was on a table in the outer room of the cave. The Chairman strode over to it and picked up the receiver.
“Yes,” he said, “this is Mao Tsetung!”
Those of us standing outside the cave were startled and delighted! It was like a clap of thunder breaking open the dark clouds and letting the sunlight stream down, bringing spring to trees and flowers. “This is Mao Tsetung!” That deep firm voice had confidence and strength. From the time the enemy had occupied Yenan, the Chairman had always used a pseudonym. Today was the first time he had used that great name of his. This showed that the situation had changed enormously. We had already reached the summit; the enemy would have to start going downhill.
In another section of A Million Bold Warriors I felt I was reading a passage suggesting the tender relationship between Jesus and Mary of Magdalene:
Chairman Mao and the other leaders all rose early on the morning of August 1. Knowing that we were leaving, the local people came in groups of four or five to see us off. The courtyard was quickly jammed full. Lan-lan, a young girl who had made some shoes for the Chairman, pushed her way up to him through the crowd and said: “I want to go with you!” then burst into tears.
“Lan-lan,” the Chairman said with a smile, “you haven’t left your mother yet and you’re already crying. If you go with us and cry, your mother won’t be around to comfort you!” His jesting made Lan-lan laugh.
… The people swarmed around, shaking hands and holding on to our clothes, and could not stop saying how sorry they were to see us go.
“The strange thing about being indoctrinated by the Christian religion is that it was the state religion and so at odd with the country’s status quo. Apartheid was a great evil. Black people were disenfranchised and had next to nothing in terms of human rights. Yet the Christian Gospels teach loving-kindness, tolerance and personal sacrifice.
“One example of this teaching is found in the following parable of Jesus, ‘The Good Samaritan’. In this parable a Jew is robbed and left stripped of everything on the way to Jericho. The Good Samaritan comes past and tends to his wounds, indeed even takes him to an inn and leaves money there with the innkeeper to take care of the man while he recovers.
“The important point about this story is not just love and compassion. In the time of Jesus Jews and Samaritans apparently despised each other. So Jesus was teaching people to accept people regardless of race or status. However, this homily in South Africa was only preached from the pulpit, and not practised. Or, as one National Party MP emphasised, the Samaritan took the Jew to a hotel, not to his home. So Christianity was used to justify apartheid. Thus there were churches purely for white people, churches purely for black people and churches only for coloured people, a mixture of the two races.”
I could see my Chinese audience did not respond well to the parable and my explanation. Though it may seem otherwise on the surface, there is a profoundly deep class system in China. The example of the all-important national exam (like South Africa’s matric) for 18-year-olds, deciding an entire family’s fate and social standing, is a case in point. Stories abound in China of young lovers being permanently separated shortly after the exam results: she goes on to become an engineer and eventually find a husband in her class; he becomes a vegetable seller, mourns her in poetry sometimes graffitied on walls and eventually finds a wife in his new, lower class.
“Then there is the question of these two words.” I wrote down the words “guilt” and “shame” on the board for emphasis. “Being taught from an early age to believe that someone else was brutally whipped and then slowly killed in the most appalling manner for your wrongdoings, your sins, imprints at a subconscious level an inconsolable, impossible guilt. How can I possibly be responsible for someone’s death 2 000 years ago? Why should he need to be so severely punished for things I may or may not do 2 000 years later?” There were a few sniggers and many open mouths in my audience now, followed by a solemn silence.
Increasingly I realised the earnest questions I was putting to an alien audience were really questions I was putting to myself. “These questions I as a child was asking at a pre-verbal, symbolic level. I believe this manifested itself later in a white group consciousness as dread and rage as the denial of the evil of apartheid continued, justified through a distortion of what the Gospels were and are trying to teach.
“During the period of Mandela coming to power, some of the charismatic churches, with a business eye on the shifting markets in South Africa, announced their new ‘Damascus road’ experiences and — all of a sudden — asked the black people for forgiveness for ignoring them while these charismatic leaders were stuffing their coffers and buying obscenely expensive cars.” I explained Paul’s Damascus-road experience to them.
As I stood there before an audience that only knew their culture, I began to feel the uncanny resemblances to my history. In this situation feel was a better word than think. Most Chinese truly believe — it is changing — that Chairman Mao and the Communist Party had freed them into a great happiness, even though, simultaneously, they whispered to me about the very hard times their parents had gone through: the purges and re-education programmes, the utter poverty where an entire family would live on perhaps a kilogram of meat a month, four kilograms of rice.
Wei Qian is my Chinese teacher and her laojia (home town) is in Sichuan province in central China. In our lessons she sometimes briefly refers to her family’s hardships. Because of the revolution times, her bama (parents) never even learned how to read and write. “You don’t need ABC,” was the insistent cant at some stages of the Cultural Revolution. How thrilled her parents must have been when Wei Qian not only learned how to read and write, but also passed the national exams so well that she, a countryside girl, was granted entry into a university in prestigious Shanghai. She now specialises in teaching Chinese to lawai (foreigners), and we pay very well — by Chinese standards.
To be continued
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