Mary Weijun Collins: Desert Rose

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

If you were ever tempted to think that deprivation and fear were ennobling, look to the Chinese
cultural revolution. Some of the most horrific scenes in this new memoir of growing up through that terrible time involve the brutal persecution of individuals by self-serving neighbours and erstwhile friends, while the triumphs and inspiration are in those few individuals brave enough, despite fear, poverty and general ideological enslavement, to behave with optimism and kindness.

Weijun Collins lived in China until 1995 when, aged 51, she came to New Zealand and married a University of Auckland professor — an unexpectedly peaceful and down-to-earth end to a story that really has all the elements of a grandly proportioned, big-screen epic.

Born into a high-ranking, intellectual family, her happy childhood was cut short by Mao's cultural revolution. Everything about Weijun's family was now "black" and despised; high status was given to peasant families (one favoured fellow student is described as "third-generation peasant", thus "red" and privileged).

Weijun remembers, as a young teenager, becoming ashamed of her non-revolutionary background. "How much I wanted to have been born to a factory hand or a peasant family."

After attending Clean Up Historical Reactionaries
movement meetings, her father was branded an anti-revolutionary and disappeared, probably shot, while Weijun, her mother and brother were forcibly moved to an impoverished rural area. Weijun wanted to be a teacher, although her educational opportunities were constantly thwarted by her "blackness".

Then, at 21, she was exiled to the Gobi Desert — largely as a result of her own naivety, coupled with the extreme social pressures to lift her social standing through "hard physical labour in remote places".

The hardships she endured there can scarcely be imagined. She and her fellow members of the No 13 Team of the No 103 Regiment of the No 6 Agricultural Division of the Corps of Xingjiang province lived in caves dug in the ground, in extremes of cold and heat, with little food, working the land for wheat, maize and opium from early morning to late evening, in constant fear of victimisation.

She lived there for 10 years, sometimes suicidal but more often clinging to the idea that she could make her life better. There's a really amazing scene where, after her books are burnt by the Red Army, she sneaks out late at night, at great personal risk, to feel, in the dark, through the ashes in case anything has survived the flames. Miraculously she finds her high school English textbook, and she uses this to forge her future life, secretly studying the foreign language, even though she has never met a native English speaker.

Among the social and political horror, there are love affairs — including a scandalous affair with a man
nearly 20 years her junior, which caused further hardship — and two children, from whom she has been forcibly
separated.

Weijun's voice, as it appears in her book, retains a distinctly Chinese flavour, and clearly comes from a cultural background different to our own. There's a curious mix of hyperbole and understatement that readers may find a little unsettling.

But the story is extraordinary. Weijun's naivety might astound us in places but her incredible strength of spirit will never cease to amaze.


* Penguin, $29.95