NEW PUBLICATIONS - Stanley Hunt's 'From Shekki to Sydney' and Pamela Tan's 'The Chinese Factor' [23.01.2010]
NEW BOOKS
Stanley Hunt, 2009. From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography. Wild Peony, Sydney.
http://www.chinatown.com.au/eng/whatson.asp?arteventID=815
Pamela Tan, 2008. The Chinese Factor: An Australian Chinese Woman's Life in China from 1950 to 1979. Rosenberg. Sydney.
http://www.rosenbergpub.com.au/handleProduct.asp?id=92&catid=2
Stanley Hunt's From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries large numbers of Chinese travelled to the USA, Australia and other parts of the world to prospect for gold, or to work as labourers, gardeners and traders, but there are few eyewitness accounts of the lives of these people who predominantly came from South China. Stanley Hunt's From Shekki to Sydney fills part of that gap in Chinese and Australian social history by documenting his childhood in Shekki, his experiences after relocating to Australia, and the lives of his parents and grandparents. His story will resonate with those of many silent others all over the world.
Stanley Hunt was born Chan Pui-Tak in Shekki, Zhongshan county, Guangdong province, China. The Japanese had invaded North China, and were beginning to bomb Shekki and the nearby coastal areas of South China when he, his mother and two younger siblings, left home to join his father in Australia. Reunited in Sydney on 5 April 1939, the small family travelled north to the county town of Warialda where his father ran a general store. Australian troops were fighting in Europe and Asia, the country was still suffering lingering effects of the Great Depression, and his father was on the verge of bankruptcy. On the timely advice of a travelling salesman, his father was able to save himself from financial ruin by negotiating new terms for repaying his accounts.
Through times of rations and quotas, the family value-added to their limited supplies, worked very hard and paid off their debts before relocating to Sydney in early 1945. Stanley and his father acquired businesses and prospered. Stanley is recognised for his significant contributions to social and community work in Australia, and China.
The father worked in Australia and had only returned to Shekki a couple of times during the author's childhood: father and son were virtual strangers when they were reunited in Australia in 1939. As a twelve-year-old boy he began to work as a man alongside his father, and the development of their relationship contains many poignant moments that underscore the impact of "old country" traditions on a younger generation of Chinese maturing into adults in Australia. The author is a highly observant "outsider"as he grows from boy to man and is transformed into an "insider"......
Pamela Tan's The Chinese Factor: An Australian Chinese woman's life in China from 1950 to 1979
Pamela Tan (Tan Pingmei) left Australia in 1950 as a young Overseas Chinese woman patriotically attracted to the possibilities of the new China created by the success of the communist revolution. She stayed for nearly 30 years, experiencing a roller coaster ride through a period of initial promise followed by a series of disasters to the country, disasters that inevitably affected her personally. Finally, by now disillusioned with her life in China notwithstanding several years of the country’s recovery from Maoist excesses, she returned to Australia to start a new life in 1979, and was joined by her Chinese family the next year. As a student, occasional consultant on China for government and private bodies, and writer, she gradually completed her intellectual and spiritual movement away from the socialist ideals that had long sustained her in China to the quite different philosophy of Buddhism. In this honest and informative memoir, Pamela explores her experience, beliefs, confusion and fear in China, while also providing insight into her young life in Melbourne that contributed to her quest, and her post-China journey once back in Australia. The China experience is the core of her story.
While this book is a personal memoir focusing on Pamela Tan’s life in China, it inevitably charts the trajectory of the People’s Republic itself. We see an optimistic Pamela in the first half of the 1950s, a period of peace and construction that generated similar feelings in wide swathes of society. Things started to go wrong with the anti-rightist campaign in 1957, the campaign when several of Pamela’s friends were labeled ‘rightists,’ and, for the first time she felt fear. This was soon followed in 1958-60 by the ruinous Great Leap Forward, a half-baked economic strategy that resulted in a massive famine costing perhaps 30 million peasant lives, and also resulting in drastic reductions of rations in the cities. Yet Pamela, like most urban residents and arguably even most peasants, continued to have faith in Mao and the party.
The Cultural Revolution, with its chaos and violence, was a further shock, but like most of her colleagues Pamela continued to believe, at least in Mao. Each further strange development, notably the death of Lin Biao, Mao’s personally chosen successor, while fleeing China, together with charges that Lin had planned to assassinate Mao, further strained faith in the leader and system. Doubts were growing in the population generally, but for Pamela and many others it was only the events of 1976—the ousting of Deng Xiaoping and his moderate policies, the resurgence of radical echoes of the Cultural Revolution, and the failure to honour properly Premier Zhou Enlai following his death, that pushed loss of faith to the breaking point. Still she assessed Mao as ‘a great man,’ but one who ‘had exceeded the limit.’
Pamela Tan’s engrossing story puts a human face on the tortuous history of Mao’s China. The very fact that her story is ‘ordinary’ provides great testimony to the power of Mao’s regime in creating a narrative that could, to a large degree, be sustained even as one disaster after another engulfed the Chinese people. There is much to learn from the parallel stories of an individual we can empathize with, and a system that truly ‘exceeded the limit.’
Foreword by Professor Frederick C. Teiwes, one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese elite politics.