Ruth Earnshaw Lo’s book in the eye of the typhoon is really a precious resource which helps readers to look into the normal pe

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Ruth Earnshaw Lo and Katherine S. Kinderman. In the Eye of the Typhoon. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Ruth Earnshaw Lo’s book, In the Eye of the Typhoon, is really a precious source that helps readers to look into the ordinary people’s political life during Cultural Revolution. An American woman, she married her Chinese husband and stayed in China for 40 years, in the last decade enduring the Proletarian Cultural Revolutions, in which her whole family inevitably involved. She narrates this certain period both as a participant and as an observer. As one member of a victimized family, she is a participant of the Cultural Revolution; as a foreigner, she is an observer.

Her complicated family story sheds light on various issues of political life. Ruth, a student from the University of Chicago, married her Chinese language teacher, Dr Lo Chuanfang in Shanghai in 1935. Attracted by the new government’s “united front” slogan, they remained in China after 1949, hoping to continue their role as educators under the new regime. However, the following series of political movement dashed their hopes. Lo Chuanfang was designated as Rightist in 1958 while they served as faculty in Zhongshan University, Canton. Because of his “Rightist” shadow, both of their two children, Tientung and Mingteh failed to enter to college. Then in Cultural Revolution, Lo again become the target of mass criticism. Big character posters were put on condemning Lo “secretly sabotaged Chairman Mao’s thoughts in lecturing on teaching method”; Their home had been frequently ransacked by university students, high school students, workers and even unknown group , with the purpose of “tearing down the four olds” or “searching for black material”, ar anytime during any day. Lo had to tolerating endless interrogation endless interrogation, being summoned out for publicly reviling and finally succumb to a heart attack without timely medical care in 1969. Partially compulsory, her daughter Tientung woked in Gansu province (remote northwest area of China, far away from their home Canton) and her son Mingteh settled in the rural commune as an “educated youth”. Ruth was left as a virtual prisoner in her home in Zhongshan University.

As a foreigner and the representative of another culture, Ruth scrutinized the Chinese society from a comparatively new cross-cultural perspective, which is greatly different from the memoir written by native authors who generally care about the power struggle and the feeling of the victims. Ruth is also a victim of the Cultural Revolution, but she makes a further step than most memoir authors. She probes many interesting life details and tells a specific story about the life, although the accuracy and appropriateness need further proof. Ruth argues that there is no end to struggle in the People’s Republic of China. Her reasons are very special: the scarceness of food and the agricultural land. There are billions of people occupying a limited living space; hence the problem of food resource will continue for a very long time. She used a daily conversation among Chinese people as the proof for her conclusion: “the common greeting all over China is a version of ‘Chih liao fan meiyou’(Have you eaten?), and the only acceptable answer is ‘Chih liao’(Yes, I have.)”. In spite of the logic problem, Ruth shows us a new observing way or thinking perspective toward the Chinese Cultural Revolution, rarely used by scholars and native authors. Ruth is just by this way to personalize the Cultural Revolution and make it comprehensible in human terms.

It is through this kind of life-oriented and cross-cultural describing perspective that Ruth reveals that China lacked of the rules of law in the Cultural Revolution. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, one of the worst things is the “False accusation tactic”. Accuse with no ground can be used by anyone as a weapon to carry out his personal revenge, without impunity. And this kind of tactic were even welcomed and praised for their zeal. A girl, being jealous about Ruth’s daughter Tientung, reported to Workers Propaganda Team that Tientung hid weapons at home, and let to another ransack in Ruth home. Ruth’s real experience and her acute perceive illustrate the ineffectiveness of the social organization and bureaucracy in that period.

Also, Ruth’s cross-culture perspective can be found in her government-mass describing way. While most scholars and authors restate and study the Cultural Revolution from the power-struggle perspective between the elites and the sections, Ruth, as an ordinary person, iterates this history period to some degree from the standpoint of the relation of government and the mass. When refer to the effectiveness of the bureaucracy, Ruth argues that the dysfunction of the organization and the bureaucracy offers the mass great opportunity to express their opinions. Ruth points out, in 1966 some of the “rebels” had for a time been spokesmen for the great silent unorganized majority. But after the four year ‘revolution’, local Party members werejust rehabilitated. Those privileged bureaucrats, who crashed down in CR, were gradually returning to their positions from 1971. Things didn’t change. Apparently, Ruth’s narrative way, in great degree, originates from her cultural background-----democracy thinking way.

A non-expert and a foreigner, Ruth’s thinking and arguments about the Cultural Revolution remain problematic in some issues. First, she concluded that: there is no end to struggle in the People’s Republic because China has too many people and too scare food (p.282). But in fact the population can be diminished, and the lack of the food, in some degree, is caused by the misleading policy of the central government. Both of them can be changed. So her conclusion should be revised. Second, her analysis about the mass and the government is superficial, since the motive and the activator of the Cultural Revolution, as many scholars point out, cannot be explained simply by relation of the mass and the government. It is the logic of western societies. Third, her argument and worries about the declination of teacher’s status and respect to teachers were inaccurate. Ruth’s consider that after the academic work getting started again in 1971, the relationship between teacher and student were fraught with problem. Ruth believes that the tradition of teacher-respecting will be destroyed after the Cultural Revolution. Actually, Ruth underestimates the power of this tradition, which is implanted in people’s basic characters. The decline of the teacher’s status was gradually recovering with the influence of tradition. Fourth, the reliability of her data is doubtful. Some details are too specific to be true. How can she remember the conversation between her and her servant such as “Have you ever seen me wore silk dresses” (p.41) in 1967 when she wrote her book in 1980. It is dubious that the book is not the product of the ideology. Ruth is a victim of the Cultural Revolution and left China with great disgust toward this society, hence the accuracy of the book will be problematic, maybe some part of it is constructed for her this kind of repulsion feeling.

In the eye of the typhoon shows people a clear and intuitive description about the Cultural Revolution from the across-cultural and daily-life perspective of a participant and an observer. Ruth’ penetration to the daily life and the perspective of viewing from a different culture makes his book distinctive from other memoir books. However, it is also because of her role as victim and foreigner, she partially misunderstand and inaccurately restate the Cultural Revolution.

Jun Zhang