Review: Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong

As a foreign exchange student at Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution, Jan Wong ratted out a classmate who expressed a treasonous desire to leave the country for the West. The classmate disappeared and Wong, driven by guilt, embarked on a mission to find her and make amends.

The search for the classmate gives Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found its main narrative drive, but the book also reads like a family vacation travelogue, since she has brought her husband and two sons along for the trip. As a result, the detective story to find the missing classmate feels overblown. It turns out that the classmate would have been in lot of trouble anyway, whether or not Wong had reported her. In essence, Wong’s role in the whole affair was minimal, and her guilt about it, while valid, isn’t expressed with enough emotional weight to sustain a whole book. It makes her seem self-centred by making it all about herself.

Having said that, let’s now make it all about me. Beijing Confidential is written with a certain tone that feels uncomfortably familiar to me: that of an Asian person, raised in the West, looking back on the “homeland” with foreign eyes, and seeing mostly absurdity and otherness. I’ve written in this mode before. Essentially, this type of writing evokes a feeling of, Wow, isn’t it strange over there?

Isn’t it strange that how bad the traffic and air pollution is?

Isn’t it strange that they eat those smelly durians?

Isn’t it strange that a Communist country has embraced capitalism so readily?

If I had read this book five years ago, this tone would have struck a genuine chord with me: my personal travel experiences to China and Asia had been anxious affairs. Reading it now, I’m turned off by it because I’ve been questioning my biases. The anxiety was my fault, not China’s.

Based on unscientific observations, I’ve noticed that a culture’s personal space is inversely proportional to its population density. Take Finland, which has only one-third as many people as the entire city of Beijing. On a recent trip there with Sam’s hockey team, I saw a Finnish man waiting impatiently—two meters behind a Canadian dad—at a salad bar in Lohja, population 41,400. The Canadian took his sweet time filling his plate, unaware someone was waiting for access to the pickled herring. In Canada, the salad-bar norm is about two bowls’ distance. In China, the person behind you would be digging into the same bowl, then leapfrogging you in the line.

• Jan Wong

My family is from Hong Kong, and growing up, I absorbed by osmosis an anti-China sentiment. Bathed in Hong Kong’s modernity, we saw Mainlanders as backwards and uncivilized and rude. The speed of China’s eventual growth was seen as unearned, like they had gotten there by cheating.

When Hong Kong was struck by civil unrest a couple of years ago, it was a natural reaction for me to take the side of the protestors, against China. But, to my surprise, some members of my family went the other way, leading to some heated debates. It shocked and confused me because it was such a 180 from what I grew up with.

Now that time has passed, I’m ready to see their side of it. Yes, Mainland China was on the other side of a border from us, but that border was dictated by external colonial forces. Even though I grew up believing that the Western influence was beneficial to us, it doesn’t mean that I should forget the shared ethnic and cultural history that existed before Communism and British colonialism. I’m not saying that I love China, but I’ve been trying to not take for granted some of the assumptions and prejudices that I hold against them.

So, when I read a book like Beijing Confidential, it feels like it represents a state of mind that I used to have, and that I’m trying to expand myself beyond. It makes me want to read a book that will put me in the shoes of someone who is not like me, someone who sees China as their home, and not a strange, foreign place.