Susanne Messmer:
Chinageschichten (China Stories)
Initially, my interest in China was centered on the young Chinese film industry as well as punk and rock music in China, but after German editors kept asking me to write the same type of newspaper articles about “Chinese people” and “their conformity” during the summer of 2008 (I was there during the Olympic Games in Beijing), I suddenly recalled my first trip to Beijing back in 2004. One thing immediately caught my eye: old people who filled public places with an air of nonchalance that astonished Western travelers. Old men taking walks while carrying their pet birds, old women practicing shadowboxing in the park. Men playing cards on the sidewalk, women chatting or playing music together in the alleys of the historic city center. Even the most clueless of tourists would get the impression that they have lots of stories to tell - and that they don’t seem to care one bit about conforming.
While the German media was reporting on gold medals and doping scandals, I was - almost as an act of defiance - holding my first preliminary talks with people close to the age of 80 in Beijing, with grandparents of colleagues of colleagues - and I was thrilled. In the early summer of 2009, I finally got the opportunity to continue these conversations, delve even deeper, and track down a number of new, exciting people to talk to. Trying to get people to tell stories about what they went through during China’s turbulent past in the last century, stories they might not have even told to their own children, as a completely unknown author from the West - now, that was often a real feat. My translators Li Man and Dang Yuan, and their childlike curiosity, were an extraordinary help, as was my pregnancy during the first group of conversations in the summer of 2008, and my six-month-old daughter Mei, whom I often brought with me to the second group of conversations in the summer of 2009. Anyone who works so much despite being pregnant and having a baby must truly be committed to what they are doing - at least, that’s the popular opinion.
And that’s the way it was. I was dying to know whether it was possible to not give up the search for personal happiness in a country like China during the largest famine known to man or during the Cultural Revolution, for example. How did these people survive, how did they manage to get by, how did they hold on to their dignity? I got the answer to all of these questions. I hope that my book “Chinageschichten”, with its conversation transcripts, published by Berlin-based Verbrecher Verlag, can make a small contribution to the history of private life in China. I hope that an exhibition of the portraits of those whom I spoke with will be held in a Beijing cafe in 2010, I hope that I will be able to attend, and most of all, I hope that everyone that I spoke with will meet each other there.
Susanne Messmer
Chinageschichten
Verbrecher Verlag, October 2009
Initially, my interest in China was centered on the young Chinese film industry as well as punk and rock music in China, but after German editors kept asking me to write the same type of newspaper articles about “Chinese people” and “their conformity” during the summer of 2008 (I was there during the Olympic Games in Beijing), I suddenly recalled my first trip to Beijing back in 2004. One thing immediately caught my eye: old people who filled public places with an air of nonchalance that astonished Western travelers. Old men taking walks while carrying their pet birds, old women practicing shadowboxing in the park. Men playing cards on the sidewalk, women chatting or playing music together in the alleys of the historic city center. Even the most clueless of tourists would get the impression that they have lots of stories to tell - and that they don’t seem to care one bit about conforming.
While the German media was reporting on gold medals and doping scandals, I was - almost as an act of defiance - holding my first preliminary talks with people close to the age of 80 in Beijing, with grandparents of colleagues of colleagues - and I was thrilled. In the early summer of 2009, I finally got the opportunity to continue these conversations, delve even deeper, and track down a number of new, exciting people to talk to. Trying to get people to tell stories about what they went through during China’s turbulent past in the last century, stories they might not have even told to their own children, as a completely unknown author from the West - now, that was often a real feat. My translators Li Man and Dang Yuan, and their childlike curiosity, were an extraordinary help, as was my pregnancy during the first group of conversations in the summer of 2008, and my six-month-old daughter Mei, whom I often brought with me to the second group of conversations in the summer of 2009. Anyone who works so much despite being pregnant and having a baby must truly be committed to what they are doing - at least, that’s the popular opinion.
And that’s the way it was. I was dying to know whether it was possible to not give up the search for personal happiness in a country like China during the largest famine known to man or during the Cultural Revolution, for example. How did these people survive, how did they manage to get by, how did they hold on to their dignity? I got the answer to all of these questions. I hope that my book “Chinageschichten”, with its conversation transcripts, published by Berlin-based Verbrecher Verlag, can make a small contribution to the history of private life in China. I hope that an exhibition of the portraits of those whom I spoke with will be held in a Beijing cafe in 2010, I hope that I will be able to attend, and most of all, I hope that everyone that I spoke with will meet each other there.
Susanne Messmer
Chinageschichten
Verbrecher Verlag, October 2009
