Thank heavens for small miracles, folks. Small miracles like globalization.

Why?

Well thanks to this most ornery of mega-planetary economic phenomena, one can always remain confident of somehow finding themselves at an English language bookshop in pretty much any large European city, regardless of the national language. And let’s face it, the very best fictional and non-fictional works today are churned out in the English language, folks, and there’s no debate there. Globalization means more English books available for the road-weary in all of us. Stranded hopelessly because of some geological narishkeit taking place on that lone frigid island somewhere off in the Atlantic. Anyways…

It’s with that in mind that I was happy to stumble across Jan Wong’s most excellent Chinese Whispers: A Journey Into Betrayal (336pp, paperback, British edition, US edition here, affiliate link) in one of my favorite Bern bookshops, Thalia.ch. Thalia’s housed in the “soussol” of Bern’s Loeb department store, located directly in front of the Swiss capital’s main train station, or hauptbahnhof, in case you’ll be passing through the city anytime soon. Note on language: don’t you just love how Swiss German, as a tongue, borrows liberally from the French? – hochdeutsch this throaty German is not, all you linguistic purists out there. Understandable, I guess, given how the country is trilingual (or nominally quadrilingual) and borders, ew, France. Still, I always chuckle whenever I overhear a Berner or Zuricher give directions to some wayward German or Austrian tourist while using the word strasse, or street. Instead of saying the word properly, as a Hamburger or a Berliner might, they drag out their variation’s a, roll its r, and do their level best to sound like Bill or Ted in some cheesy ‘80s flick. The word ends up sounding like straaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasse, which to indeed is an acquired taste; though my love of the Swiss, especially in the German-speaking cantons, remains as strong as ever. The worst part about Swiss German is how they cause all these hot Latin immigrants to gobble up the Swiss German accent hook, line, and sinker. They give them a disease they don’t want to have. It’s like rape. It’s like what mange cake (literally “cake-eating,” but what are otherwise white people) Torontonians do to their immigrants: they make bland white bread out of exotic Latinos and South Americans and it’s a damn cryin’ shame. Though I digress (but I’m entitled to since I’ve just returned from a marathon thirty hour combined train and bus journey).

Chinese Whispers marks my second “accidental” China book find at Thalia (the first was John Ghazvinian’s horrifyingly underrated Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, another madcap investigative piece which takes place across a series of African petrodictatorships nipping closely at the heels of Africa’s Chinese investors). I was sure glad to have Whispers along for the ride, keeping me riveted, as it had, during an otherwise sleep-deprived journey mitteleuropaische journey.

Whispers dutifully recalls one of journalist Wong’s return trips to China, this one from 2003 which she conducted along with her entire nuclear family, as she tracks down the whereabouts of a former classmate of hers, Yin Luoyi, who she voluntarily snitched on (yes, Wong was intent on repeating this adjective more than once for emphasis) during her impressionable Maoist Cult Rev days, a time when Wong was only one of two – count ‘em! – two foreign students admitted to study at the recently reopened Beijing University (aka “Beida”). Wong, daughter of famous Montreal restaurant tycoon Bill Wong and a former history student at my alma mater, McGill University, would become an intelligent, though highly impressionable, twentysomething falling under the sway of Mao’s fiercely anti-US, anti-Soviet “Third Way” political vision for the People’s Republic.

As an Overseas Chinese, who grew up speaking pidgin Cantonese to her grandmother while growing up in post-Quiet Revolution Quebec, Wong eventually made her way to “Red Beijing” to become one of Mao’s diligent – and duped – foreign disciples. As Wong enmeshed herself ever-irreversibly in Mao’s manic machinations towards the tail end of the Cultural Revolution’s decade of hellish insanity, a wayward request by Yin Luoyi about possible emigration to the United States lead to her willingly ratting Yin out to Wong’s Communist Party faculty functionaries. Emigration to the capitalist enemy?! How could Yin even consider it, Wong then foolishly believed?!

Yin disappeared and was never heard from again…

After graduating Beida and receiving her undergraduate degree from McGill, Wong subsequently secured her masters and then a journalist degree from Columbia’s School of Journalism in New York, moving on through a series of freelance and staff newspaper gigs until she landed the coveted Beijing Bureau Chief’s position for Canada’s national (some would say prestigious) daily, The Globe and Mail. The Globe posting would afford Wong a bird’s eye view on the growing student unrest and protests during those fateful months of May and June 1989, also having the rare, but dubious, honor of observing the infamous Tank Man incident play out right in front of her from high atop one of the scene’s adjacent balconies. Tank Man and the Tiananmen Massacre permanently altered Wong’s attitude about her once-beloved PRC and lead to a long phase of disillusionment about China and Wong’s role in it as a misguided young Maoist (pictured above at a factory).

As time passed and as Wong settled into her predictable and comfortable Toronto lifestyle, raising her two boys Sam and Ben along with her one-time Maoist and fluent Chinese-speaking husband, Norman Shulman (who moved to China in the ‘60s to dodge the Vietnam draft, and why he didn’t go directly north to Canada remains unanswered in Wong’s book – looks like we’ll have to wait for Shulman’s book of his own), Jan Wong began to harbor a burning curiosity about what became of Yin Luoyi in the aftermath of Wong’s inexcusable misdeed. She began to suffer nightmares in which Yin was always somehow present. So in 2003 Wong finally decided to take the plunge by booking off the entire month of August of that year – one of the absolute ickiest, muggiest, most smog-infested months in the entire Beijing calendar – in a last-ditch gamble devoted to tracking down Yin “in a nation of 1.3 billion people,” as Wong would describe the sheer magnitude of her ostensible mission impossible. She brought along her boys for moral support, which she trudged off for twenty-eight days of work that was truly cut out for her.

In the weeks that followed, it would lead to a series of uncomfortable reunions with personalities from Wong’s Beijing University past: staunch Cult Rev cadres and other sniveling cowards of the day who were responsible for “handling” her and her then-US roommate Erica, another foreign-born Overseas Chinese Maoist, while they were enrolled at Beida’s Foreign Students Department. Wong describes in captivating detail how heart-wrenching it was for her to revisit “the scene of the crime” at the university and the many cold reactions she would eventually receive over the phone and in person from former professors and overseers as she began to probe – reporter style – into the mysteries of what become of the viciously-denounced Yin. As was the case with many Chinese citizens who directly experienced, contributed, or lived the horrors of that terrible decade, from 1966 to 1976, the year in which Mao died, the past was better left unexamined. The less to emerge about what truly happened during that era, the more obscure that decade would remain to future historians and observers, the unstated intention of many of the Cultural Revolution’s worst perpetrators and most stalwart advocates.

Chinese Whispers reads like a bona fide detective story, a wise choice taken by Wong and her publisher. As we plow our way through the middle sections of her book, Wong appears to drift further and further away from her goal and it makes her – and us, vicariously — increasingly despondent. Her trip becomes a futile round-robin of restaurant outings, lunches, dinners, and wild goose chases – both in person and over her cellphone – as Wong becomes increasingly despondent nearing the final week and a half of her otherwise monumental journey.

Of course, there are no spoiler alerts at ADM.com, so you’ll just have to grab it for yourself to learn about what really happened… :-)

But Whispers is as much a perseverance and passion tale as it is about a treasure hunt whodunit. It describes the resilience of one woman – Jan Wong — to right the wrongs of her impressionable youth, to refuse to concede or evade responsibility for her life’s self-described most heinous act against another human being which she could never forgive herself for as the decades passed. It is also about what happens to a human being, Yin Luoyi, who tumbles to their life’s absolute lowest point, the deepest drop into the well, yet how there’s only one way back into the game: up.

Wong’s signature style of funny quips interspersed at unpredictable moments throughout her delicious prose – you’re going to fall in love with her nicknaming conventions in the book and how Wong constantly pokes innocent fun at the literal English translations of some of her Chinese interlocutors’ Mandarin first names, including her own, “Bright Precious” – and the ample historical background Wong supplies for many of the events depicted, events she herself lived through during the early 1970s. You’ll also berate yourself for not mowing through this 336pp read in just a single sitting, if that’s the case, because it’s really that good, and I’m not just saying so because it was my constant companion during my Swiss road trip from hell. Wong has once again demonstrated in Chinese Whispers (hey Jan, when’s the next one coming out?!) that she is indeed one of the journalistic craft’s better writers in the field. And a Canadian, to boot! ;-)

If Jan Wong’s first book, Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now proved it, then Chinese Whispers just reinforces it…

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