One Russia, Two Chinas. George FetherlingЧитать онлайн книгу.
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ONE RUSSIA
TWO CHINAS
GEORGE FETHERLING
Copyright © 2004 by George Fetherling
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.
This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, Suite 1010, 409 Granville Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6C 1T2. www.beachholme.bc.ca. This is a Prospect Book.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and of the British Columbia Arts Council. The publisher also acknowledges the financial assistance received from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Design and Production: Jen Hamilton
Cover Art: (Upper) The Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God Copyright © by Victor Potoskouev; (Lower) The Island Pagoda by John Thomson Copyright © by National Museum of Photography, Film and Television/Science & Society Picture Library
Author Photograph: Merrill Fearon
Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis Imprimeur
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fetherling, George, 1949-
One Russia, two Chinas/by George Fetherling.
“A Prospect book.”
ISBN 0-88878-433-3
1. Fetherling, George, 1949- —Journeys. 2. Soviet Union—Description and travel. 3. China—Description and travel. 4. Taiwan—Description and travel. I. Title.
G465.F47 2004 910.4 C2003-910072-3
ONE RUSSIA, TWO CHINAS
ALSO BY GEORGE FETHERLING
TRAVEL
Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp FreighterThree Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma
FICTION
The File on Arthur MossJericho
MEMOIR
Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties
POETRY
The Dreams of Ancient PeoplesSelected PoemsMadagascar: Poems & TranslationsSinger, An Elegy
CONTENTS
4 Diseases of the Soul
5 Transsib
China 1990
1 Comparative Embalming
2 Chongqing!
3 Downriver
4 The Buzz on the Shanghai Bund
Indochina 1990
Taiwan
Prologue
1 Taiwan 1991
2 Taiwan 1995
Epilogue
Afterword 2004
For such a modest book this one has taken a long time to finish, but that’s because the story itself was incomplete. In the spring of 1990 I went on assignment through the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China, heading towards Southeast Asia. At the time all those places, but especially the Soviet Union, seemed to be vibrating in the expectation that important events were underway or about to begin.
The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc (and of the Berlin Wall that symbolized it) came with what struck many people as an unstoppable counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. The situation there was the mirror image of that in China, where the pro-democracy movement had been suppressed so cruelly. Yet the two occurrences clearly were manifestations of the same urge, a demand for democracy in many regions of the world that had had no recent experience of it.
The following year I went for the first time to Taiwan, which was still a one-party state in the long shadow of Chiang Kai-shek and his family. I returned there in 1995 when Taiwan had transformed itself into a vigorous and indeed raucous and rambunctious democracy. My purpose on these two trips to the island was similar to my purpose in going to Russia and China: to get a look at the effects of seismic change while it was still going on. I was not posing as a literary travel writer, making semi-fictional characters from pieces of individuals encountered along the way. Neither was I being a reporter, writing only of forces and background without reference to history and culture. These pages, set down shortly after returning from notes made on the spot, are from an older tradition. Most of the material appeared long ago, often in substantially different form, in two obscure books of mine, Year of the Horse: A Journey Through Russia and China and The Other China: Journey’s Around Taiwan, both long out of print. Reading the texts now, I itch to rewrite them, obscuring my naïveté and bringing my spur-of-the-moment comments into line with what we all know actually happened next. But I resist and try to confine my perfect hindsight to an afterword. For all its infelicities, this collection of notes remains what it was then: simply an indication of how matters looked at the time to someone who was there because he wished to be.
I once departed Canada for France aboard a ship with a Russian crew and came up on deck at dawn the next day to find them doing callisthenics in the rain. That had been my only experience of Soviets in groups. The recollection came back to me at once at Mirabel, that vast empty white elephant of an airport from which Aeroflot flew to Moscow several times a week. A crowd of a couple hundred people with the distinctive blood-coloured CCCP passports was going home—people with wide Slavic faces, many of them, some of the women with scarves on their heads and a large number of bulky bags or cartons tied with rope, some of the men wearing sweatshirts under their copious blue business suits. At neither end of the departure process—at the check-in counter or at the gate—was