A Revolution in Many Voices

By Sandra Burton

LEGACIES: A CHINESE MOSAIC by Bette Bao Lord; Knopf; 272 pages; $19.95

During the three years that China's door was opened widest to the world, American Ambassador Winston Lord and his wife turned their embassy residence into an exciting salon for Chinese intellectuals. To the delight of those artists and academics who were regulars, these gatherings offered American films, disco lessons and a rare place to talk freely to one another -- and to their effervescent hostess, Shanghai-born novelist Bette Bao Lord. Well before the advent of the democracy movement in Beijing, she began recording their uncensored life stories. Back in the U.S. after the crackdown, she spliced them together with recollections drawn from her own Chinese roots. The result is a vivid and startling mosaic of the political struggles that foreshadowed the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Rather than chronicling last spring's events, Lord concentrates on coming to terms with legacies from the past: her family's and China's. In her uncle Jieu Jieu, the wise peasant who boasts an "unwashable brain," Lord sees the best aspects of the masses in whose name the Chinese revolution was waged. Supremely pragmatic, Jieu Jieu never bought Chairman Mao's line that the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s would instantly catapult China into the ranks of industrialized countries. On the other hand, Lord broods over the dilemma of an elderly scholar whose Western education made him an outcast in a society that he resentfully characterizes as "of the peasant, by the peasant and for the peasant."

Lord's most indelible portraits involve the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution. An actress talks at length about being forced to drop out of a school for the gifted when her librarian father was accused of being a "rightist." She confesses to Lord that her resentment hardened into a "hate so unnatural that it could sever the bond between a loving father and a loving child." Not until she was sent to collect her father's ashes from the prison where he died did she come to see that it was the regime, not her father, that was the enemy. "Your father's ears were torn off," a prison official confided to her, giving the lie to the explanation that the death was a suicide.

Lord's quest to learn how a whole generation could have "thought it glorious to humiliate their elders . . . to report on family and friends; to storm strangers' homes; to hurt fellow Chinese without consideration of sex or age; to maim and kill" netted her two interviews with former members of the Red Guard. One of them, a historian, recounted how he bludgeoned his favorite teacher. As other students began hurling insults and then blows at the victim, the mild-mannered historian "imagined more and more eyes looking at me, demanding answers." Realizing that he would be stripped of his prized Red Guard armband if he failed to take part in the assault, he constructed a rationale to justify joining the brutality. His teacher's past devotion had been but a ruse to tar him as a fellow counterrevolutionary, he reasoned. He convinced himself that the manner in which the old man fell to his knees proved that he was guilty.

In her reflections on the democracy movement, Lord forsakes the realism of a diplomat for the romanticism of a novelist. "Until Li Peng's announcement of martial law, I had hoped against hope that Deng Xiaoping would walk into the Square; that cupped in his hands would be a peach, the symbol of longevity; that he would proffer it to the hunger strikers, young enough to be his great- grandchildren.' ' With that one dramatic gesture, she argues, "he could have . . . won back the hearts that were once his." But days after she left China, the crackdown came, and Lord began weaving together the voices that so powerfully convey the legacies that the present leadership inherited, and the ones those leaders will bequeath.