I took my first good look at China from the window of a train on a frozen Christmas morning. I had lived in Hong Kong and made several trips to the China mainland, but this was different: I was here to stay. My first morning in my new home. I woke early in my sleeper cabin as the sun was rising, and with the palm of my hand smeared the condensation from the window. It’s a curious thing, but my body clock, no matter where I am in the world, no matter what time I have gone to sleep, remains aligned to the sun. As the earth stirs for a new day, so I am gently nudged awake. It is good for a soul such as mine to stir early, to snuggle into silence and allow my mind to follow where my thoughts lead. I had a lot on my mind that day. My family was still rugged up and asleep. They had, without reservation, excitedly embraced this adventure. So here we all were on a slow train. I wanted my children especially, even if asleep, to feel the movement, the rhythms of the train and the pull of the earth that would work this new place into them. The journey is part of the story that comes from my ancestors, Aboriginal people of Australia whose tracks form a songline across country as vast and foreboding as the one I was now in. It is in the journey that I seek permission, that l ask this place will let me in.
I have done this everywhere I have been, on long road trips or just walks around unknown streets in new cities. These are my quiet rituals of belonging. I want to allow the place to make space for me; to welcome me; to show me what matters. It may be somewhere to eat, a park bench or a bookstore, but these places invite me in, and in this way I join my stories with all the stories that have come before. What was it the psychologist Carl Jung said? Land assimilates its conqueror. We may think we are masters of all we survey, that we rule the land, that we leave our footprint, yet with every step the land is changing us. It was cold inside the train, and I shivered a little. Steam rose from my breath, and through the streaky window I looked out on this place. What roads led me here? What twists of fate and providence? I have always lived a restless life, always wandering because wandering is the happiness of the anxious soul. I had forever been moving. My childhood memories are a blur of places and people, dark nights and long roads. I was never more content than when squeezed in with my siblings in the back seat of a car, watching the headlights scatter the darkness. I would count off one by one the white illuminated posts by the side of the road. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a kangaroo. I was forever lost in thought, until the movement of the car and the hum of the tires on the road would lull me to sleep. One small town bled into another, and I grew older, but I never lost the lure of the journey. Journalism was the perfect calling for someone so anxious and restless. From the moment I walked into a newsroom I felt I belonged. It was freedom. I was in a world of ideas and argument and words. I wanted to chase the story; I wanted to go where the story led.
Journalism is not for the timid or those who live by a clock. It is for the reckless and the irascible and the tireless, even the foolish. I can understand the desire for certainty and security, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I have never met a good journalist who knows when to switch off. My first instinct was always to say yes – to a new story, a new job, a new home, yes, yes, yes. Journalists run into the fire; they run towards the gunshot. Journalists don’t like no and they don’t say no. My restlessness, my instincts, had taken me around the world, from the islands of the Pacific to Africa, to the great cities of Europe, to the deep history and blood feuds of the Middle East, and now I was on a train to China. China had always lived in my imagination. That big mysterious place on a map that I recalled from childhood, pinned to the wall of my classroom. I remembered sitting on the floor, hands tucked under my legs, and watching black-and-white film of a land crowded with people, grey suits and bicycles. Everyone appeared to move quickly. I started school at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, and I imagine every primary-school-aged child in Australia at the time would have heard the name Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader of communist China. I recall the time I first saw his image: a portly, serenely smiling figure standing amid a crush of young, feverish faces, all waving Mao’s Little Red Book, the sayings of this man they called the Great Helmsman. This was at the height of the Cold War, when the world lived in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe. I can recall watching a film of American kids doing ‘duck and cover’ drills, sheltering under the desks to avoid radioactive fallout in the event of an attack. The communists were the enemy: the Soviet Union and China.
The ABC TV program Behind the News started the year I started school, and this was how I came to know the world, to think of places beyond my own. My class would gather around a television and watch images of the Vietnam War, man on the moon, protest, conflict and chaos everywhere. It left its mark on me, even without me realising it, always the best lessons. It ignited something inside that one day would set me on a journey to tell the stories of foreign places and a world in change. Back when I was a boy, China was always a hungry land. Who of my age doesn’t recall being told to eat all your food because there were children starving in China? This man Mao and his Great Leap Forward had led his country to famine, and tens of millions died. I must have heard somewhere that phrase ‘the sick man of Asia’, that’s what China was called then. It was a big country that could not feed itself. China was the stand-in for all things foreign or forbidden. There was a schoolyard myth, you know the one, dig a hole deep enough and it would lead to China. So I did, and it didn’t. I learnt about the Chinese in the Australian gold rush of the nineteenth century. I stared at those sepia-toned photos of sinewy, dark-skinned men wearing what looked like a cross between an apron and a dress, with pigtails and usually pushing wheelbarrows. The Chinese were some of the earliest foreigners to come to Australia, yet it says something about how we see our country that they have always been outsiders. That’s because Australia, for all its later embrace of what we like to call multiculturalism, is still, at its core, white. A white person in Australia will never be asked, ‘Where do you really come from?’ A third- or fourth-generation Chinese Australian will never cease having to explain themselves.
China was distant and exotic and mysterious and exciting and frightening. Its people had their own culture and language, their own philosophy, faith and story. These people looked so different. Let me correct that: they are not just a people but many diverse peoples, for China is not one thing; it never has been. What we now call China is the product of thousands of years of war and revolution and empire. Turmoil is a constant state of being. The famous fourteenth-century Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms opens with the line;
The Empire long divided must unite; long united must divide. Empires rise and fall, each Emperor casting a long shadow even though all around them there was treachery.
To the Chinese, China was the world. They called it the Middle Kingdom — the centre of all civilisation – and the emperor was the Son of Heaven. But that was long ago. This China that would be my home had been humiliated; it had been conquered, exploited, dominated by foreign powers. It had been weak. And this disgrace ran deep; every Chinese child was schooled in vengeance. For them, the West was decadent and poisonous. They would take what the West had to offer – these sons and daughters of China would grow rich – but they would always be Chinese. They would complete the great rejuvenation and return their motherland to its rightful place at the apex of global power.
From my train window, it would have been easy to see this land as strange, somehow. It is common for people – and here I mean European people, people of the West – to use that word strange when confronted with something different. Strange because Europeans assume they are normal. That’s what happens when a people fashion the world after their own image — just as the Chinese themselves once did. Over the past three centuries, the West had supplanted China at the centre of the world; it had defeated China’s armies, occupied Chinese land and plied its people with opium. China was the past and the West was the future. Europeans could lay claim to the invention of modernity: a seventeenth-century explosion of science, technology and philosophy that changed how we think, work and make war. Liberty, freedom and democracy were the shibboleths of this new age. It was a time of reason, of discovery, of empire and colonisation. As the great nations of Europe claimed the world, they also turned on each other. The twentieth century had witnessed war unparalleled in its savagery. Yet these wars of modernity did not challenge the fact of modernity itself. Capitalism, communism and fascism arose, all mortal enemies but all sprung from the same well: they were competing utopian visions of what it was to be modern, to be European. To be modern was to be beyond history, in a perpetual state of new beginnings, informed by the past but not beholden to it. History to Europeans was an arc of freedom, a sundial of progress moving assuredly from East to West.
The great eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel believed that China was a place without history. To him, world history began only with the ancient Greeks. The West measures history in a straight line, and even catastrophe is something to be left behind. In the West, even as we commemorate old battles and remind ourselves, ‘never again’, forgetting is prized more than remembering. Liberalism and democracy demand endless progress; they don’t cope well with too much history. That helps explain why China is still seen through Western eyes as ‘strange’. History, for the Chinese, is never over. That’s the difference between a civilisation and a nation: civilisations have long memories, while nations are always about tomorrow. That’s what I saw from my train window — the space between the future and the past, between becoming and being, between progress and eternity. This China was not strange to me; it was all too familiar. To stare onto a hard, cracked land was comforting in its way, because I could see myself here. Because I too came from a hard place and a hard history. Like the Chinese, I was born into a family and a people swept away on history’s tide. The modern world had washed over us and we were left like survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to the debris of our lives. My ancestors had been invaded, colonised, massacred and then cast aside in a new country — a new European country — that had been built on our loss. What was left is an existential sadness. I could say that I shared the sadness of this land. I know what the Chinese mean when they say they will eat a thousand years of bitterness. It means they will endure; they will survive whatever the world throws at them, and it will make them stronger.
l also saw a country haunted by history. This land seemed to pulse with memory. In the cold morning light, with just the rattle of the train to break the silence, I could hear the whisper of all the people who had lived here. These are the lands that speak to me: forever lands, places where borders and dates and flags and armies, all those markers of what we might call a nation, matter less than the earth itself. Lives, countless lives, born into a place, those who loved and laughed and cried and laboured and died and then returned to the earth, they never disappear. They become part of the place itself, and all those memories hang in the air. In the distance I saw an old Buddhist pagoda surrounded by hills with barely any trees, and there, on a flat piece of ground, was a lone man working his field with a horse-drawn plough. It was Christmas Day – I had to remind myself of that. Christmas Day in a place where there was no Christmas, where there was no God. Think about that – the man in the field would likely have never heard of Jesus. His life had been lived under the Chinese Communist Party, which had banished religion. Back home in Australia, my family – my parents, brothers and sister and their children – would be awake soon, and the kids would start tearing at their wrapped presents under the tree.
My mother would start cooking, and other family members would drop by, and the food and company would last all day. I missed my family most at Christmas. I missed Australia most at Christmas: hot, sticky, flyblown Christmas. But as much as I loved my country, I could never stay. There was something in our history that I just had to get away from. My wife and our boys were still fast asleep. The day before, we had closed the door on our life in Hong Kong and boarded this train for Beijing. We had told the kids that it was the Polar Express: a train bound for the North Pole and Santa Claus. They had played along and strung up stockings outside their sleeper carriage. We had filled them with presents while they slept. My wife had made an advance trip to Beijing to find us a house, and had bought bicycles for each of the boys and set them up inside our new home for a surprise when the kids opened the door. This was the move I had been hoping for: now free of the news presenter’s desk in Hong Kong, I was on my way to a life of adventure as China correspondent for CNN, one of the biggest news networks on the planet.
The return of China as a great power was already shaping the fate of the world. In the years ahead, it would exercise a great hold on me: it would become the defining story of my career. This country was in the midst of an economic revolution that had lifted more than half a billion people out of poverty. China was now the engine of global economic growth and the world’s factory, producing our phones, shoes, shirts, televisions, refrigerators. There was barely anything the Chinese did not make, and more cheaply than any other country. Gone were the bicycles and old grey suits; in their place were fashion brands, Audis and McDonald’s fast food. The Communist Party was defying the Western liberal belief that said a country cannot become rich without becoming free. The Party was instead doubling down on its power: it would stop at nothing, not even the slaughter of its own people, to keep its iron grip on the nation. All predictions pointed to China becoming the most economically dominant nation on the planet, an authoritarian superpower.
As the train pulled past, I stared at the man in his field. What things he had seen. Even from my window, just a snatched glimpse, I could see this man looked old. He had been born into a country hidden from view. The twentieth century was a time of upheaval and breathtaking violence for China, the end of empire and the tumultuous birth of a new People’s Republic. This man had likely seen famine and mass starvation. Like nearly all Chinese, he would have been raised to revere Chairman Mao, whose portrait would have held pride of place on the wall of his small village home. I wondered if this man had been a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Had he denounced the bourgeois enemies of the state during the Cultural Revolution? I wondered if his son or daughter now lived far from the ancestral home, in a city, working in a factory and sending money back home, dreaming of riches in a China that was reclaiming its place in the world.
Although from different worlds, this man and I shared a lot – our lives stood at the crossroads of history. We were twinned with fate. We belonged to old cultures whose worlds had been upended by the march of modernity. History lived in us: every one of our ancestors had a hold on us. This man had likely never strayed far from his village, yet the world had come to him as China shook itself from its slumber and began to throw off the yoke of a hundred years of humiliation. And me? I had left my country to find a place in the world, and my wandering had brought me here. I believe there are no mere coincidences; nothing is simply happenstance. Every step we take, every choice we make, every stranger’s face we see can change who we are. I swear that, as my train moved past this man, as I looked back at him for one last glimpse, he stared right at me. My wife soon woke, and she turned to me still half-asleep. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said. I looked at her and smiled, then looked back out at this place called China. I heard my wife behind me: ‘Home,’ she said.
getupsolomon 