#fanshen

A Review of the Theatre Experience ‘Invisible Treasure’ by fanSHEN

When I put out a request on Twitter for things to do in London during half term, we were invited to a production entitled ‘Invisible Treasure’ from fanSHEN playing at the Ovalhouse Theatre until November 14th. So, Grace,aged 8, and Emily, aged 10, and I went along on the morning of Thursday 29th October to see what it was all about.

As a theatre lover I thought I had seen most things but this was…

Director of Invisible Treasure, Rachel Briscoe TALKS TO THEATREFULLSTOP ABOUT TH PRODUCTION!

fanSHEN and Tipping Point, with Ovalhouse present Invisible Treasure. Invisible Treasure is part of the autumn 2015 theatre season Fabulism, an extraordinary collection of work celebrating the fantastical in the everyday. Invisible Treasureis an interactive digital play space, an electrifying exploration of human relationships, power structures and individual agency, where your actions can…

getting trashed is fun but how about something else

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, by William Hinton, is good propaganda. "good" both in the sense that it is effective as propaganda, being entertaining and educational about false things, and "good" that it's a good book, entertaining and educational about true things.

It's about the Communist revolution of the 1940s in China as concerns a single village, Long Bow (张庄村, Zhāngzhuāngcūn) in the norethern part of the country. It's not so much a regular history text as it is a "documentary", as explained by the book itself; individual people are very important, they're sometimes interviewed separately, that sort of thing. It really does read like a documentary film watches, which is not something I think I've seen before.

I've tried to write out a rundown of the book four times. I don't think it's happening. So: If you want a book on the practical consequences of a Communist policy in the small scale, with numbers and charts - in China at this time specifically, or in feudal societies, or whatever - this is a good pick. Or if you like seeing the concrete policy statements of Communists, which are mysteriously hard to find in my American upbringing.

Both sides of this gully-like main street were lined with mud walls six to eight feet high, broken here and there by covered gateways that led into the courtyards of the people. Beside each gate was the family privy, hopefully placed at the edge of the public road in anticipation of a contribution to the domestic store of fertilizer from any traveler who might be in need of relief.

The crops grew only on what was put into the soil each year; hence manure was the foundation of the whole economy. The chief source of supply was the family privy, and this became, in a sense, the center of the household. Long Bow [the town] privies were built in the form of a deep cistern, topped with timber, or stone, and provided with a single narrow slot at ground level for both deposition and extraction. Here night soil in liquid form accumulated all winter. Legendary in the region were the landlords so stingy that they would not allow their hired men to defecate in the fields but made them walk all the way back to the ancestral home to deposit their precious burden. Other landlords would not hire local peopl eon a long-term basis because local people were wont to use their own privies while a man from outside used that of his employer.

Animal manure, together with straw, stalks, or other waste matter, was composited in the yard. So highly was it valued that old people and children constantly combed the roads and cart tracks for droppings which they scooped up and carried home in baskets. This need to conserve every kind of waste and return it to the land was responsible for the tidy appearance of the streets and courtyards even though the walls were crumbling and the roofs falling in. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was left lying around. Even the dust of the street was swept up and thrown on the compost heap or into the privy, for village dust was more fertile, by far, than the soil in the fields.

This book is so elegantly dull.  It's dry in that way that environmental histories are, that 1960s labor histories are, where you don't realize that they're rich and awesome until after twenty pages of miserable miserable descriptions of soil and valleys where you're drooling in the margins and you read a passage about steamed buns, sweet cakes, keta, corn dumplings, millet sorghum noodles, Shangtang cotton shoes, crumbling packed walls and soil soil soil and you wake up a little and realize that it's perfect.  Bless these white men, all of them from Cornell, Oxford, Columbia, Chicago (Hinton, Thompson, Terkel, Foners--Phillip, Eric, Jack) all of them with their Steinbeck adolescences and dads that may or may not have been working class or alcoholic but were very much patriarchs.  All of their motherfucking sweeping landscapes and their weighing, wet dullness and their prefaces which are either full of exclamations--marked, otherwise--or of how they remember those Shansi Riverbeds and let me reconstruct just how vividly.

All of you, gloriously boring and soaringly inspirational white Marxist reconstructionist men of sixties trade paperback histories, where would you be without Vintage books?  Or still-enthusiastic white male history majors about to apply to the PhD programs where you either still teach, or where you died and left your names?  The kinds of college students who still like Steinbeck?

People often cite the Communists as the ones inciting violence during the Chinese Revolution. Those same people also say that things were good back then before the Communists were in power. However, if you reflect on how things were in feudal China, what was so good about it? 

In Fanshen, William Hinton documents life in a Chinese village called Long Bow. Before the Revolution, instances such as these were common:

I and the children worked for others thinning millet. We got only half a quart of grain. For each meal we cooked only a fistful with some weeds in it. The children's stomachs were swollen and every bone in their bodies stuck through their skin. After a while the little boy couldn't get up. He just lay on the k'ang sick with dysentery and many, many worms, a whole basin full of worms crawled out from his behind. Even after he was dead the worms kept coming out. The little girl had no milk from me, for I had nothing to eat myself, so, of course, she died (43). 

One Taihang peasant struck back at a landlord who raped his wife. He was hung by the hair of his head and beaten until his scalp separated from his skull. He fell to the ground and bled to death (52). 

Peasants confronted oppressive forces on a daily basis. Landlords would make them work until they couldn't anymore -- or worse, until they died. Rich relatives (even brothers) would use and abuse them as they wished. To make things worse, the French sent over Catholic bishops. People were forced to join because this was the only way that they would get money and grain during a bad harvesting period.

Chinese girls were often given up to the Catholic church's orphanage. These girls would become the orphange's property. When the girls were old enough, they were tasked by the orphanage to clean, cook, sew, and various other forms of labor; they worked between 12 to 14 hours a day. The orphanage would sometimes lease these girls to other people so that both the orphanage and church would get a steady income. When the girls were old enough, they were sold off to men to become their "wives".

    A woman settling the score with a landlord. 

If people had to live under those circumstances from the day that they were born, it is no wonder then that peasants reacted so violently towards their oppressors during the Chinese Revolution. As Hinton has similarly expressed: 

When agrarian revolt flared in isolated parts of China after the suppression of the Great Revolution in 1927, neither the legitimate gangs of the village politicians nor the illegitimate gangs of the local despots were enough to suppress them (53). 

No one, including the Communists, could hold the peasants back from their revolts. The peasants were unleashing years and years of anger that they were forced to keep suppressed. 

Peasants only had bitter stories to tell when they reflected on the past. If things were good "back in the day", it was only good for those who were the exploiters: the Catholic institution and the gentry. (According to Hinton, the word gentry describes: landlords, rich peasants, and person who made a career of serving them and their interests (such as bailiffs, public officials, village scholars) whose standard of living was comparable to that of the wealthy and came from the same source -- the exploitation of the peasants.) The poor peasants had nothing to lose and everything to gain when feudal China was smashed.