The stakes were high for memoir writer Qin Qin as she struggled with the unwritten red lines of the Chinese government’s censorhip pen.
‘I’m genuinely scared of bringing up so many negatives about China. The place is run on self-censorship because of fear,’ I wrote to Annie, my editor and a fellow Chinese-Australian.
I thought back to when I worked for UNICEF China. Flying back into the country after a holiday, I stood in the Xiamen airport customs queue. A row of screens near the x-ray machine caught my eye. In Australia, strict biosecurity measures require travellers to declare food, plant or animal items. In stark contrast, customs officials in China look out for a different contraband.
‘Journalists declare!’ the screens proclaimed in English, a warning that was somewhat softened by cutesy cartoons of a microphone, notebook and pen.
—
At first glance, my debut memoir, Model Minority Gone Rogue, shouldn’t raise the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) suspicions: I was never a foreign correspondent, a researcher, or human rights activist; nor was I a woman with a PhD or a gay man, all potentially subversive to the regime.
Plus, the CCP targets literary writers, not commercial authors like me whose book is stocked at Big W in time for Mother’s Day (please do gift it to your mother though).
And the memoir is about career pivots, and failing and unlearning – seemingly nothing to do with Xi Jinping’s obsession with disremembering history.
But as a first-generation Chinese-born Australian with years studying and working in the mainland and Hong Kong I couldn’t separate my personal story from The Middle Kingdom.
—
The Tiananmen Square movement, one of China’s most taboo topics, alongside Tibet and Taiwan (the ‘Three T’s’) saw courageous students call for democracy. They were the reason for the Hawke government’s unprecedented offer of asylum for Chinese students in Australia, including my father at ANU. My mother and I left China and joined him in Canberra in 1989.
‘May be better not to mention [the] Bob Hawke thing,’ my dad texted when I showed him a draft paragraph. He knew instinctively what was safer not to say.
That’s because Mao’s Cultural Revolution formed the backdrop to my parents’ childhood. It was a time when persecuted people fell out of windows and committed ‘suicide’, continuing a suspiciously common historical proclivity that Russian oligarchs have now taken over.
Scanning the final edits, my chest tightened knowing the manuscript would soon be published. My words would not go over well with the current authoritarian regime, given their fondness for disregarding historical facts and their loose definition of free speech.
The academic Perry Link compared the CCP’s censorship apparatus to an anaconda in the chandelier, always watching, ready to drop down as a looming threat.
Even in the safety of my Canberra home, the anaconda looms.
—
Bringing up anything China-related risked consequences, especially under Big Brother the CCP’s watchful ‘saving face at all costs’ eye. The concept of face is partly why the regime is so hypersensitive to criticism. Even unwatered grass is politically sensitive. To maintain the facade of steady progress and aesthetics, the government directs workers to spray-paint dry grass and barren mountains green and spends billions on global propaganda campaigns.
Was it going to be worth it, to reveal when I looked after my cousin Yuanyuan who had attempted suicide from overdosing on pills? She was referred to a hospital which specialised in ‘poisoning’ since mental health was a cultural stigma. Or my shock at seeing rows of trees on a residential Beijing street each hooked to intravenous drips for nutrients?
Then there were the everyday instances of the security apparatus I mention, such as my ‘allegedly’ bugged Beijing office, civil-society friends being asked to ‘ tea’ with the authorities and discovering the local police had rifled through my homework during a yoga teacher training course.
—
The questioning was the point (and to the CCP, the problem).
The real feat of the regime is not only in its rapid transformation of China into an upper-middle-income country. It is the government’s act of psychological engineering to stay in power.
It stifled those of us who could speak but didn’t, whether in-country or not, or who were complicit in other ways: scholars, businesspeople, politicians, and multinationals like Apple.
—
My grandma is still in China. Most of my relatives still live there. Will publishing my memoir mean I can’t go back for fear of being detained? What if I can’t see my granny before she dies, or my relatives are targeted because of my work, a strategy the regime has honed, as more dissidents escaped overseas?
‘Those fears are extremely valid. There is truly no pressure to share more than you’re comfortable with,’ Annie my editor responded, validating my concerns.
Besides, how can anyone criticise the Communist party?
The Party has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty (let us not mention the tens of millions of deaths from man-made famine and violence). Surely that’s more impact than even the World Food Program has had delivering hunger relief globally.
But how could I write about myself without writing (truthfully) about China?
—
As I was struggling with the edits, I thought back to the wave of protestors who had endured too many COVID lockdowns by late 2022. They gathered on the streets clutching blank sheets of paper. The paper could ‘represent everything we want to say but cannot say’, a man told Reuters. That wasn’t a protest, not technically.
Maybe there was a way I could do something similar – evade the risks of writing about China, but also make a point.
I dragged my mouse pointer to select a chunk of text, then clicked on the ‘text highlight colour’ to choose black. Sentences instantly disappeared under the cover of darkness (e.g.: hello).
The manuscript started to resemble an Australian government’s Freedom of Information request for a report on asylum seekers’ treatment. But at least I’d avoided criticising the CCP.
Satisfied with the solution, I re-submitted the pages to Annie.
—
‘I am not too sure about the redacted text,’ she replied the next day. ‘It kind of disrupts the text and makes the paragraphs themselves a little more difficult to understand.’ That was a polite way to say, ‘WTF are you doing?’
Problem-solving out of fear wasn’t going to work.
—
‘You can’t sit on the fence,’ my journalist friend Sue-Lin said, when I called her for advice. ‘The fear is a feature, not a bug.’ She used to report from China but was forced out of the country when her work visa application was denied.
Layers of conditioning had made me afraid to speak up, including knowing what happened to the Tiananmen student protestors. But their slain bodies – slaughtered, crushed and pulped in their fight for free speech and democratic ideas – were the only reason I made it to Australia in the first place. And the point of my memoir is to speak my truth, continuing the legacy of all writers who face, and have faced, far more risks in doing so.
Anaconda be damned.
I sent the manuscript back to Annie unredacted.
Model Minority Gone Rogue: How an unfulfilled daughter of a tiger mother went way off script is published by Hachette
Qin Qin (formerly Lisa Qin) is a first-generation Chinese Australian writing on the lands of The Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples.