LEGACIES: A CHINESE MOSAIC
Bette Bao Lord
New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1990
246 pp., $19.95
On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, Chinese student-leader-in-exile Chai Ling led a vigil across from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to honor those who had been slain. “I want to open people's eyes to what is happening in my country. I want to say don't forget those who died, and don't forget the people who are still suffering,” she said.
The same urgent passion propels Bette Bao Lord in her latest Work, Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic. The China-born, best-selling author has produced a moving and skillful interweave of her family's history with the life stories of other Chinese caught up in the brutal storm of Chinese communism - who lived to tell the tale. “If my friends' stories are the pieces of the mosaic,” she explained to me in a recent interview, “I feel that my story and the story of my family give it a context or glue with history. And, of course, the headlines of Tiananmen Square give it resonance with today.”
Born Shanghai
Born in Shanghai in 1938, Bette Bao Lord left China when she was eight and with her family settled in Brooklyn. Like many Chinese mothers, Mrs. Bao pushed her daughter toward a practical career. However, at Tufts University Bette was failing chemistry and decided to take up history instead. Later she went on to study international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she met and married fellow graduate student Winston Lord. He eventually became a principal adviser to Henry Kissinger and in 1985, was appointed ambassador to China by President Reagan.
Bette Bao Lord thus returned to the land of her ancestors. For the three and a half years of their stay, Madame Ambassador met and feted Chinese political leaders and government officials, intellectuals and artists, workers and students. Her entertaining became renowned, and the intelligentsia and the avant-garde of Beijing gathered in her salon to discourse and to disco.
“Winston and I were also able to enjoy unprecedented access to the Chinese people,” she writes thoughtfully in Legacies, who profoundly touched us with their capacity to endure. They lived in uncertain times… They lived in a country of limits. Limits imposed upon them by scarcity … Limits imposed upon them by the traditional philosophy that prized family above individual, harmony above equity, order above change. Limits imposed upon them by the tenets of Communism that exalted Party above all.
During those years Lord began to tape interviews with her family and friends - research for what she had hoped would be a future novel. Yet, despite having written two highly successful books in the United States, she found herself unable to write while in China. Even she felt the paranoiac crush of living in a police state. “I couldn't write when I was there,” she says, articulating her thoughts slowly, with great deliberation. “There's an atmosphere to self-censorship there that's so automatic … Chinese writers have to weigh every word not only for its literary contribution but for its political
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