-->
Yesterday
I was unexpectedly reminded of a boyhood hero of mine and the reminder came
from an extremely roundabout source. Here is the story:
I recently had an inquiry from a
young woman filmmaker from Buenos Aires in Argentina if there was any
possibility that we could meet during her approaching visit to Montreal.
Yesterday she arrived, Laura Tusi, a fairy intense, enthusiastic woman in, I
imagine, her thirties, who has been
brought to Canada by her interest in making a documentary film about a small
group of Argentinians, most of them Quakers, if I have the story
correctly, who many years ago
established a community in a British Columbia town called Argenta, in the very
heart of the Kootenays.
Here
is the Wikipedia entry about Argenta:
Argenta is
a settlement in British Columbia. Located on the west side of
the Purcell Mountains,
on the northeast shore of Kootenay Lake, it was founded during a silver mining boom in the 1890s. Argenta
was given its name by the Argenta Mining Company from the Latin word for
silver, argentea.[1]
In 1952, Quakers settled in the town. Primarily
from California, they first established the Delta Co-operative Association in
1954. They then went on to found and operate the Argenta Friends School, a
boarding school, from 1959 to 1982. Students studied academic subjects, as well
as gardening, how to milk cows, chop wood, and cook on a wood stove.[2]
In the 1960s, Argenta attracted anti-war protesters, as well as hippies, back-to-the-land residents, and members of
the counter-culture.
With a population of just 100, many
residents have gone on to great things, including one who worked as an
economist at the World Bank in Washington. Another former student of the
Friends School is head of disaster relief for the UN in Nairobi, Kenya. Nancy
Herbison changed her name to Nancy Argenta and became a well-known opera singer
based in London.
Laura
Tusi’s aunt, now in her eighties is one of the Argentinians who took up
residence in Argenta, and is still there. During her description of the town Ms
Tusi mentioned that a prominent personality had been Hugh Elliot, a man who had
worked in China in the pre-Communist years as a teacher at a school deep in the
interior that had been run by a New Zealander called Rewi Alley. Alley is the boyhood hero I mentioned in my
introduction. He disembarked in China from a ship in 1929, and stayed there for
the rest of his life, becoming such a famous figure that his eightieth birthday
in 1987 was celebrated by a banquet given by, and attended by, all the leaders
of the Communist government of China.
In the 1930s Alley founded the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, but
when this was destroyed during the Japanese invasion, he decided he should
retreat to the far reaches of the country, and establish a self-sufficient
school to train rural workers that would be impervious to invasion. So, his school --- the Baily school named
after an American who was its first principal --- was established in a village
called Shandong, supported by the contributions of well-wishers in New Zealand,
Australia, the United States, and probably elsewhere.
When the Communists swept into
control of the country, Alley concluded they were trying to do for the nation
what he was doing on a local scale in his school, so he became an enthusiastic
supporter. The government demanded he
renounce foreign money in support of his school, but they kept it going, and
eventually it was transferred into the city of Lanzhou and given the status of
a university.
When I visited China as a member of a
National Film Board crew in 1978, one of my first requests was to meet Rewi
Alley, who to me, was an almost legendary figure. We were put off with one
excuse or another, but when we were making our obligatory visit to the model
commune of Tachai (for which absurdly
exaggerated production figures were claimed as part of a misguided attempt to
persuade other communes to more effort), I noticed one evening in the dining room
an old white man dining with a group of Chinese officials. I thought he looked like Rewi Alley, so I
went over and introduced myself, and sure enough it was the man himself. He apologized for not being able to meet us,
but later came over to our table, and I had the pleasure of a talk with him in
his room. He told me then --- prophetic
words --- that he was not worried about the Chinese being able to make things:
they were an industrious, clever people, and could make anything, What worried
him was their ability to feed their people.
His primary interest was, what is happening to the water table? With thousands of wells being sunk all over the
country especially in the agricultural areas, how could the water table, that
underground system of acquifers that keep everything going, last? That is probably China’s number one problem
to this day.
Alley was one of a handful of old
China hands from abroad who chose to stay in the country after the Communist takeover.
Hugh Eliott was one of those expelled.
In the Macarthy-ite atrmosphere of the United States in the 1950s, he
found it impossible to settle there, so he moved north to Argenta, where he
became one of the pillars of the community. He apparently died a few years ago,
but his work is about to be immortalized by Laura Tusi, if she ever gets to make
her proposed film.
I felt quite offended when John
Fraser, the Globe and Mail journalist
in his book on his experience as a correspondent in China, wrote a vicious
denunciation of Alley for having followed the Communist party line through
thick and thin, treating him as nothing more than a crude propagandist. He was,
of course, “struggled” against by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution,
but nothing could shake his faith in China and their rise from being the
world’s most despised people.
I met Alley again in 1983 when I was
researching a proposed film for UNICF about child services in China: he was in
hospital, already declining in health, and he died four years later at the age
of 90.
To give a flavour of his life, work
and attitudes, I cannot do better than quote from some of his statements,
recorded in the Wikipedia entry about him:
“Never mind about whether
you are a student of China or not, as long as you are among the ordinary people
you will get an understanding, a real understanding of this country. You're
already in amongst it... Some very bad things happened. The price of China
breaking free of foreign domination and the bad things of its past was
enormous. They reckon that it cost 30 million lives to build new China. The
West should have a bit more gratitude for the struggle of the Chinese. If it
wasn't for the resistance in China during the Second World War, the Japanese
would have had tens of thousands more men and they may have got as far as
Australia and New Zealand. Back then sides were clear-cut. They were clearer
even before the war, if you had the wit to see it. I became involved in China's
struggle and I chose my side. After the war and the revolution, I knew I had a
choice. I could have joined the critics of China, but China had become like my
family and as in all families, even though you might have been arguing with
each other, when the guests come you present a loyal unified face to the world.
I could have joined the journalists and so-called sinologists in condemning everything
about the revolution, but I had already chosen my side.
"This place
(China) is a great case study of humanity; one of the biggest examples of
humanity's struggle. If you can't feel for these people, you can't feel
anything for the world. Although it was in France, in the First World War, that
I first had a taste of China. I can remember when there were a lot of shells
falling and we had our rifles and our steel helmets on and there were these
coolies. Coolies, that's a word people don't use much any more; but that's what
they were, these Chinese labourers. Coolie comes from the word bitterness.
These blokes were eating their fair share of bitterness in France. Navvies for
the poms, they were. Shells bursting and the ground shaking like there was an
earthquake, and they were stripped to their skinny waists and just kept
unloading the wagons. I saw endurance and a determination that I had seldom
seen before. Then later, back there in the thirties, I was involved in the
factories in Shanghai and I can remember seeing sacks in the alleys at the back
of the factories. At first I thought they were sacks of rubbish, but they
weren't, they were dead children. Children worked to death in the foreign-owned
factories. Little bundles of humanity worked to death for someone's bloody
profit. So I decided that I would work to help China. I suppose then it was
like a marriage of sorts and I wrote what I wrote and said what I said out of
loyalty to that marriage. I know China's faults and contradictions; there are plenty
of those. But I wanted to work for this place and I still do. I woke up to some
important things here and so I felt I owed China something for that."
"I had human principles and I made choices based on
these. I have always been and will always be a New Zealander; although New
Zealand has not always seen me as that. But I know my own motives. The buggers
even refused to renew my passport at one point and they treated my adopted son
very badly. Did you know that when Robert Muldoon visited Mao Zedong in the
1970s he was the last head of state to see him? Well I'm told that when Muldoon
asked what he could do for Mao, Mao is supposed to have said 'Give Alley his
passport back.'
"I love New Zealand, and sometimes miss it. New
Zealand is a good country, populated by basically just and practical people.
But there is a fascist streak in New Zealand as well, and we must always be
vigilant to prevent it from having too much sway. I remember as a boy, I was
walking along the beach near Christchurch and there was a group of men coming
back from a strike, or a picket of some kind. Suddenly, out of the dunes came
police on horseback and they rode into these unarmed workingmen, swinging their
clubs as if they were culling seals. I will stand up against such forces as
long as I can stand. Even here, in the Cultural Revolution, when some young
blokes came in here and started breaking things I grabbed one of them and put
him over my knee and gave him a proper hiding. I got army guards on the gate
after that. That was thanks to Zhao Enlai, looking after an old mate from
Shanghai; but I stood up to them. I know many in New Zealand see me as a
traitor to their culture, but I have never betrayed New Zealand. What I
betrayed was the idea many New Zealanders had of what a Kiwi should be and what
was right and wrong in the political world. There is a very big difference.
"Successive New Zealand governments have tried hard to
discredit me as if I was some sort of communist threat to them or a traitor.
Well I am a communist, but I am not a traitor. I have always loved New Zealand.
I just said what I thought was important and true."
No comments:
Post a Comment