pg-12111

A Love Story

Rao Pingru was 90 when he decided to write his memoirs. The result is a journey through most of twentieth century China, but above all, it is an intimate and dedicated look at the love story that he had with Meitang, his recently deceased wife.
by
 
More or less fictionalized, personal memoirs about the years of Mao Tse Tung’s government abound in Chinese literature, even when published outside China. And what is read in these memoirs is almost always a record of personal stories traversed by historical reality, where the intervening characters play the double role of a relatively day-to-day existence coupled with a mission that moves them away from this, in order to fulfil political and social aspirations – the neighbours who suddenly become soldiers, plundering houses where they were once welcomed; relatives who are denounced; colleagues who once supported and shared moments, who from one day to the next, become the audience clapping hands and stoking the mood at public humiliation sessions.
 
At 96, Rao Pingru is a man who likes to write and draw, cultivating that apparent simplicity in the word and the stroke, concealing a sound knowledge of the classics and an endless admiration for the harmonious union of word and image that traverses an important part of the oldest Chinese literature. 
 
In 2013, the editor of Guangxi University published a written and illustrated account of his life – later translated into French in 2017 and, this year, into English. Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China was published by Pantheon Books, a Penguin publisher that dedicates part of its catalogue to comic and picture books, with a English translation by Nicky Harman.
 
Rao Pingru’s account begins with his earliest memories, aged eight, and the moment he began school. The year was 1930 in Nancheng, and this initial description focused on the writing materials that he was about to begin using, and the methodical way of drawing the contours of each learned Chinese character give us a good initial picture of the narrator and his fascination with writing, and everything this tool comprises in terms of communicative potential, both in practical and emotional terms. 
 
From here, the years follow in descriptions supported by the recovery of memories, often fragmentary, where we accompany the education of Rao Pingru, his learning beyond the walls of school – rational, affective, familiar – and his discovery of the world. 
 
This world will gain a new glow with the arrival of Meitang, a girl whom he had briefly met in childhood – their parents were friends – and whom he would fall in love with in his youth, before an intense engagement and a marriage that would last until the end of Meitang’s life.
 
Our Story, more than a memoir or an account of the hard years in China during the twentieth century, is a tribute to the love of a life. It was not an easy life, but by removing traces of postmodern cynicism that tend to reject apparently simple love stories, it was a life lived in its broadest meaning through this encounter between two people. 
 
The narrative of Our Story never fails to focus on the relationship between Rao Pingru and Meitang and their growing family.  Historical context appears, but only to the extent that Pingru finds himself involved in it – when the Kuomintang troops, with whom Pingru performed military service, are defeated as the People’s Liberation Army advanced, or when rationing or the impossibility of fleeing is imposed through decisions the government undertakes regarding the life of each person. 
 
IMAGES AND FLAVORS
 
The vignettes that Rao Pingru composes for many of the pages of this book have a stronger relationship with the text than the simple illustration of a passage. Many of the images depict a particular moment in the text and amplify the narration, adding written details and pictorially presenting a certain scene. 
 
In a stroke taking us closer to the defined line, influences from the popular illustrations of the early twentieth century are revealed – before hyper-realism dominated most of the pictorial compositions circulating in books, posters or murals.  These images include considerable detail in their elements and gain visual force with the predominant colours: primary colours are always present, augmented with greens, browns and purples and with a palette of intermediate tones that allow for the creation of gradations around the same colour. 
 
As with the text, they are seemingly simple images, where the lingering gaze discovers the minutiae of representing all the elements that, for one reason or another, have gained importance in the memory of those who write about the past, such as the gesture of twisting a towel over a basin of water before washing one’s face, something taught by Pingru’s mother, or the immense variety of dumplings that Pingru and Meitang discovered on the streets of the different cities they travelled through.
 
Food, incidentally, is one of the strong elements in these memoirs. The taste of the glutinous rice cakes eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival in childhood, and which were never found again in any other similar cake, or the Moon Cakes sold in Jiangxi during the Mid-Autumn Festival, are remembered in word and image with the melancholy of those who know that these older flavours have gained a fitting and solid place in memory only. No matter how much similar food is found throughout life, this taste will always be in the past – we can confirm it in Proust or, better yet, in that sweet rice pudding that only our grandmother knew how to make so well.
 
SUBVERSIVE HAPPINESS
 
There are times when Rao Pingru’s writing takes on an almost uncomfortable naiveté, seemingly inexplicably disconnected from what is going on in society. References to how the political context interferes with his life are direct and without comment.  Displacement in the service of the army, the transfer to the re-education camp – where he spent two decades – the document granting him the right to recover his old work without the need for further questioning or “re-education”; all this is registered with the trouble or the suffering it can cause, but without further reflection on meaning, justice, or need. 
 
Pingru’s mission in these pages is another: to recover his memory while it still seems possible and to write about the love that was the epicentre of his life. In a sense, there is something subversive about this decision, because what the author ends up confirming is the possibility of not being structurally affected by a set of decisions designed to affect, to break any idea of ​​an individual that does not submit to the collective. 
 
There was some fortune in the course of Pingru and Meitang, yes, some ability to move through the raindrops, it could be said, but there was also the courage to not give in to what was really dear to them: when Pingru was sent to camp, several people linked to the management of the local community advised Meitang to seek a divorce by removing her name from a man considered a traitor. Meitang refused without hesitation and, without questioning collectivization, the work that had to be done or the imposed daily procedures, never allowed anyone to question her love for Pingru and the indomitable will to stay with him while their family grew. 
 
This is the strength of Our Story, much broader than the personal history of Pingru and Meitang. Individual happiness has never had a good reputation among authoritarian governments, and Rao Pingru devotes several pages to showing that not giving up this happiness may be an immense gesture of resistance.
 
When we jump from the photograph of Rao Pingru and Meitang that opens the book, young and newlywed, to the couple’s photograph shortly before Meitang’s death, we can confirm that this will be a book where China’s recent history plays its part, because no one lives isolated and without context, but it is above all a book about love and how, with luck, it can define the whole chronology of a life.
Facebook
WhatsApp
Threads
X
Email

More from the author

Featured

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Older Issues

Living and Arts Magazine

現已發售 NOW ON SALE

KNOW MORE LiVE BETTER