What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
China’s Tolstoy, China’s Hugo,
from a Canadian writer,
with thanks,
Charles Foran

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I read a newspaper article about a poll conducted by the largest on-line media company in China. The poll produced a list of the country’s ten most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, as chosen by the Chinese themselves. A full five of them were writers and three more were singer/actors. One, curiously, was a rocket scientist, while the final selection was an obscure soldier who became the focus of a propaganda campaign.

The list was familiar to me from fifteen years of reading and writing about China, and five years of living in Beijing and Hong Kong. Three of the choices, author Louis Cha and actor/singers Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong, were alive until shortly before the poll was conducted. Others, such as author Lu Xun and opera singer Mei Lanfang, continued to exert influence many decades after their deaths. I noticed strong patterns to the selections and remarked on how difficult, and extraordinary, these lives had been. I decided as well that, while far from definitive, the list was sound, and a window onto the values and sentiments of the Chinese people.

I also had a thought: imagine substituting these names with their equivalents in the West. For Faye Wong, think Madonna; for Leslie Cheung, Elvis Presley with a twist. Mei Lanfang has been called China’s Paul Robeson and scientist Qian Xuesan’s impact was akin to that of Robert Oppenheimer. Further back, Lao She’s novel Rickshaw had asserted the same kind of moral force as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, while Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged could be likened to a Shanghai version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Louis Cha’s populist wuxia novels are the match of Zane Grey’s westerns and John Ford’s films. As for Lu Xun, the oldest and most revered of the ten, he has no exact parallel. To appreciate his significance, it is necessary to look to Tolstoy’s importance to 19th century Russia or Victor Hugo’s to the Europe of his age.

The exercise left me wondering to what extent most of us really know China. Can someone claim to know the United States, say, if they’ve never seen a western or heard of The Grapes of Wrath? If they are oblivious to how Elvis Presley and Madonna altered the pop landscape? Our understanding of China remains stubbornly imprisoned by the most obvious markers: its rapacious economy and repressive political system, a population of staggering size and expectations. Yet a country is foremost a culture and a culture is the sum of the values and efforts, dreams and yearnings, of the people who dwell in it. To understand a nation, you must be intimate with its dreams and with its dreamers.

As it happens, Lu Xun has been a touchstone for me since I first started thinking about China. To the extent that this towering figure is known in the West, it is for his short-stories, which literally birthed modern Chinese literature in the 1920s, and which remain vivid, unsettling examinations of a crumbling society and an enduring psyche. I hope you enjoy this sampling of Lu’s most essential work.

Best wishes,

Charlie Foran

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

Reply:

May 20th, 2010

Dear Mr. Foran,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent letters, with which you enclosed a copy of Century by Ray Smith, and one of Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun.

The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these publications. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer