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 Love and Language in Mao's China Aug 17, 2006
By Mary B. Reed
"Avid Reader"
R. Vision's novel Butterfly Changes answers the question, how do two people who don't speak one another's language fall in love? With dictionary in hand. For Jack Friedman and Hai Bao, two writers, language is both a chasm and the bridge that crosses it.
Butterfly Changes, as its cover proclaims, is a novel about "revelation, metamorphoses, and love in Mao's China." It's also about the civil rights/anti-war movement in 1960s and 1970s Chicago and the shattering of Jack's illusions about political change and social progress. That disillusionment leads him in the 1980s to Shanghai, where he goes to teach English--and where he falls in love with Hai Bao. His views of recent Chinese history have been primarily shaped by Mao's Little Red Book, so he arrives in China as a political innocent. Experience and especially his love for Hai Bao act as correctives to those views.
Hai Bao loves Jack, but feels offended by his version (the first half of the novel, called Butterflies) of their love and of her country and therefore sets out to "correct" his mistakes in the second half (Silkworms). She knows that her English isn't perfect (though better than Jack's Chinese), but she is sure it is good enough to set the record straight. So what if she writes "snack" for "snake" or "hen pickled" for "henpecked"? She understands what matters, she thinks, but ends up correcting some of her own beliefs as she writes. Silkworms includes the story of Erbao, a turn-of-the- (last) century courtesan whose love for a Communist leader helps Hai Bao understand her own love for Jack.
Through Hai Bao, Jack learns how the Cultural Revolution changed lives, usually not for the best. Hai Bao tells him of her own experience when, as a young student, she went with schoolmates to the home of Yu, a boy who had refused to go to the country. Supposedly, "going down" to the country was voluntary, and most "volunteered" rather than face so-called "struggle sessions," where classmates and teachers did their best to intimidate those who resisted. The teacher in Hai Bao's struggle session did his best to be persuasive, probably because he himself felt threatened by the red guards and their contempt for scholarship. Yu's reason for refusing to "volunteer" is that he wants to study. For most Chinese, Hai Bao explains, whatever great things they may believe Mao intended to accomplish, the Cultural Revolution meant ten years of wasted time, ten years when such things as "study" were derided. She says "I think when ever Chinese think of a disaster, we think of the Cultural Revolution."
Hai Bao also acquaints Jack with the class structure that Communism never destroyed. Before she met Jack, she had waited six years for the young man she thought she would marry to introduce her to his mother. The mother refused to see her because Hai Bao's family were late arrivals in Shanghai and consequently low in the social order. No meeting with mother, no marriage.
True disillusionment comes with Jack's and Hai Bao's travel by train, bus, and cart in the western desert of China. Jack is depressed when he sees prison after prison lining the railroad tracks in remote areas, but soon after realizes that in Wu Tuan there are prisoners of a different sort. They were Han Chinese volunteers in the Socialist Education Movement, a 1963 precursor of the Cultural Revolution. Those volunteers were never allowed to return to the cities in the east of China that had been their homes. They consider their new location as hell, not just because of the desert heat, but because they are Han Chinese exiles in an area predominantly Uygur and Muslim. Jack begins to feel that all of China is a prison. However, it's the everyday bureaucratic inefficiency and the bribery needed to circumvent it that lead Jack to write in his journal: "Three cheers for socialism with Chinese characteristics. Strange how it resembles capitalism with corrupt characteristics." Jack is not the first wanderer in a desert to be tempted to abandon his beliefs, but love triumphs over cynicism. His idealism may now be tempered by reality, but he is still an idealistic butterfly committed to change.
Hai Bao believes a story should educate, should point a moral. The moral of her story, she says, is that both she and Jack had to write their stories to find out their love was "truly real." She and Jack both ask, "What is truth?" Both seek answers through writing--about their cultures, about their politics, about themselves. In a world where they know that language is often used to confuse and coerce, they are committed to using language as the means to understanding. Their love story is romantic, and it's set in those "interesting times" we're told we should live in. But is Butterfly Changes an historical romance? Only in the sense that, say, Doctor Zhivago is a historical romance.
 Excellent novel as well as introduction to China Mar 23, 2007
By Ross Amann
Mr. Vision presents an excellent panorama of life in the U.S. and China over 50-years. He is at his best in his lyrical flights of fancy in describing a Chinese girl's experiences over this time period. He also pulls no punches in his criticism of both countries.
He Said - She Said Mar 19, 2007
By ijk
Wow! I have never read anything quite like it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was sorry when it ended. The interaction of Jack and Hai Bao, struggling with language and cultural differences, is very well done. Part one brought back memories of the turmoil in the USA in 60's. Part two has great insights into the culture in China. The change at mid-book turned a good novel into an excellent novel. The 'he said / she said' juxtaposition is surprising and engrossing.
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