The Whisperers

Gosh it takes a long time to read a book these days and this is a whopper. It based on the kind of archive and access that you would give a leg for (you can see a taste of this at http://www.orlandofiges.com/), and much of what it covers you know - or think you know - in outline. But there are sections that are very hard to read. It tells us that women would sometimes deliberately get pregnant in the camps, despite the awful conditions, simply so as not to be alone - but their children were taken away from them and kept in nurseries as they went back to work, and were terribly vulnerable. There is one story of a girl who died at fourteen months that still haunts me. Sometimes history is there to make us see the things we wouldn't otherwise want to look at too closely.

I was expecting more on whispering - it is such an arresting image, but it gets buried in the mass of personal stories - not that these aren't fascinating in themselves, but the whole idea of lives lived with the volume down ..... Have reached the final chapter on memory, and so much of what is said here about the layering of memory and the way in which memories are patched together from the personal and the collective resonates with what one suspects about China. So despite some of the longueurs [oooh, good word] of the mid-sections, ending picks up, and pulls out something that we don't get from the earlier chapters.

It's a hard book to categorise. On one hand, what historian would pass up that material? On the other, who is meant to read The Whisperers and does the intended audience limit what you can do with it? (Check Scopus before we read too much into that...)

To live is better than to die

This is a rare and beautiful film. I had it on my shelves for months before I could bring myself to watch it. It follows the family of Ma Shengyi - Ma, his wife Leimei, daughters Ningning and Rong, and son Zhancao - through one year. The parents contracted HIV through selling blood (in a horrifically unregulated industry), and it then passed to the two younger children.

I talk about blood-selling to my students as a product of poverty in provinces such as Henan, and this film brings home what that means - not just the exposure to risk, but also what that level of poverty means in terms of living conditions and everyday pressures. I suspect some of them don't quite get it.

It is not (and should not be) an easy film to watch - we see very clearly effects of the illness on Leimei (who dies during the period of filming), Rong and Zhancao, and Ningning's growing awareness of what is happening to her family. It is deeply uncomfortable to see Leimei's decline - even when we first meet her it seems almost that she has been absorbed by her sickness and has begun to withdraw from her family - and to see her in death, dressed in her grave clothes, and to compare the costs of those to the normal family income. And then there are passages that are quite stunning visually - the fields in January, the children playing with newly-harvested maize in the courtyard - and it's quite a jolt to go from those to discussions of sickness and fear and isolation.

The film's website can be found at http://www.toliveisbetter.com/

More recently, the plight of China's AIDS orphans has been explored in The Blood of Yingzhou (2006) which I haven't seen - website at http://www.bloodofyingzhou.com/

The Chinese authorities - after first denying the existence, then the scale, of the problem - have moved to position themselves as the saviours of the suffering masses... there's a neat illustration of this in a People's Daily article at http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/6313053.html
I tell my students it's important to read the official press because it shows the limits of the 'speakable' but I confess I found this piece left a bit of a taste...