the news, she could not sleep for days: ‘You are just like the monk, going to the West for new ideas,’ she enthused. ‘It won’t be easy but if you are determined to do good, you will have people helping you. You will get there in the end. When you come back, you can help the country.’
Father was very happy for me too. He had learned that the West was not a dungeon as he had been made to believe. Nevertheless he still warned me, in the only language he knew – that of Communist jargon: decaying capitalist society was no Heaven, and I should be vigilant and not allow decadent bourgeois thoughts to corrupt me. He insisted on coming to Beijing to see me off. I thought it was unnecessary: his health was poor and the train to Beijing was slow and crowded and anyway I would be back in one year. Then he said something that made me understand. Just before I boarded the plane, I gave him a hug and asked him to take care of himself. For only the second time in my life I saw tears in his eyes – the first was when my brother was born. ‘Don’t worry about me. This is your big chance, you’ve got to take it. Look at me, look at your sisters, look at what society has come to. Don’t get homesick. There is nothing here for you to come back to.’ When I turned around and waved him goodbye, I was shocked, and sad. As someone who had devoted his entire life to the revolution, he must have been in total despair.
My father died in 1997. He was strong and had never taken a day’s sick leave. But his depression ruined his health. He came down with diabetes, and soon was paralysed and became blind. His old work unit, which was supposed to look after him, could not afford to pay his medical bills and he refused to let me do it for him. His last wish was to be buried not in a Western suit I had bought for him, nor a traditional Chinese outfit, but in a dark blue Mao suit. It was a difficult wish to gratify – nobody wore one any more. We searched for three days before we finally found one in a little shop on the outskirts of the city. We wanted him to be buried in it because it embodied his lifelong hopes, his ideals and unbounded faith, even though he had died a broken man.
Many of my father’s friends, colleagues and comrades from the army came to his funeral. The occasion, the gathering, brought out their own anger and frustration. I could understand their feelings; they were just as my father’s had been. They had sacrificed so much, gone through so much suffering and deprivation for the revolution – and now they were told what they had done was wrong. They must embrace this new world of markets and reform – but they could not; they felt they had no place in it; it was against all the beliefs they had held throughout their lives. Their whole raison d’être had been taken away. They were betrayed; they were even being blamed for what had gone wrong. The bitterness of loss was crushing and the void left in their hearts was deep. They found it impossible to cope with a past that had been cancelled and a future so uncertain.
As is the custom, my mother and my sisters prepared a meal with several dishes to thank the visitors for their sympathy and support – they had all brought presents, and gifts of money that was later used to pay off my father’s medical bills. Mother was moved – their lives were not easy either. To her surprise, many of them left the meat dishes and ate only the vegetables. These were people who used to drink with my father, and feast on all kinds of delicacies such as pig’s trotters and ox tails. ‘How come you have all turned into monks?’ she joked with them.
‘We can’t be monks. We are old Communists,’ one of them laughed, and then added, ‘it’s good for our health. And it’s better not to kill anything.’
I wanted to ask the old men about what they believed. In his last years my father often reminisced about Grandmother, and regretted his harshness towards her, especially selling her little statue of Guanyin. He did not become a Buddhist but in the twilight of their lives, I knew some of his oldest friends had actually turned to Buddhism, the very target of their earlier revolutionary fervour.
But before I had a chance to question them, they asked me if I had become a Christian. I shook my head, telling them I still did not know what to believe. ‘Many Chinese are going to church. You live in England and you don’t go to church?’ one of them said. ‘She should be a Buddhist,’ another one interrupted him. ‘She is Chinese after all. Buddhism is the best religion.’
Buddhism was making a come-back in China. In the early 1980s, the government had issued a decree allowing a limited revival of religion. As a Marxist would put it, the base had changed so the superstructure had to change too. The decree allowed for the 142 most important Buddhist monasteries damaged or destroyed in the Cultural Revolution to be restored or rebuilt. Monks and nuns in their orange and brown robes once more became a regular sight in towns and villages. In the cinema and on television, young people watched for the first time the lives of great Buddhist masters, albeit all kung fu wizards or martial arts heroes, who used their fantastic skills to save a pretty woman or impoverished villagers. The faithful could go to the temples, make offerings to the Buddha, draw bamboo slips to tell their families’ fortunes, and join monks and nuns in their chanting of the sutras and other Buddhist rituals. In a way, it resembled the old days when Buddhist monasteries were among the most important centres of Chinese life. They were a source of spiritual comfort but also of practical help with birth, illness, death and other crucial events in life. They received the infirm and the insane who were abandoned by their families and reviled by society. They gave the disillusioned and the discontented the perfect retreat, where they were asked no questions and given the space they needed. Many Communists, including senior Chinese leaders, had been sheltered in monasteries when they were hunted by the Nationalist government.
Observing these changes, I found myself thinking more and more about Grandmother. When I visited a temple, I would light incense for her; in the swirling smoke, the image of her counting beans in the night came back to me again and again. Sometimes I read a sutra and found the stories in it very familiar – they were among those she had told me in our long foot-washing sessions. The forbearance, the kindness, the suffering, the faith and the compassion were what she embodied. I felt many of the elements she had tried to instil in me were slowly becoming part of me. I began to see how extraordinary her faith was. She had suffered so much, enough to crush anyone, let alone such a frail person. Her faith kept her going, even though all she could do was to pray on her own in the dark, without temples and monks to guide her, and derided by her own family. Her beliefs made her strong despite her lifelong privations. She was illiterate but she knew the message that lies at the heart of Chinese Buddhism, the certainty and the solace. That is why she wanted me to follow her faith and acquire the strength it gave her. I never gave it a chance, rejecting it early on without really knowing what it was. Now I wished I could believe something so profoundly.
It was about the time of Father’s death that I decided to go on my journey and follow Xuanzang. I had been inspired through my early education by the idealism of Communism, but the intellectual ferment and questioning I was exposed to at Beijing University stayed with me. With Father’s death and the collapse of his world I lost all that remained of my attachment to the cause he gave his life to. I knew I was lucky, I was free and I had not suffered like my forebears and my fellow-countrymen. But like so many Chinese, I felt strongly that something was missing. The idea of a confirming faith dies hard. I was increasingly unsure of where I was going, why I was doing the things I did; I was at a loss, and pondering. Probably when I made the decision to go I wanted some clarity in my life, and the journey would give me a very clear objective.
Of course, I could have just sat in libraries and read about Xuanzang. But I knew that would not be enough. I did not think I could find a different outlook just by reading. The Chinese have a saying: ‘Read ten thousand books; walk ten thousand miles.’ I wanted to explore for myself, to make sense of everything I had been reading about Xuanzang and about Buddhism. He found his truth by going in search of the sutras – I had to go and look for mine.
It would be a spiritual journey for me but physically demanding too. Travelling along Xuanzang’s route would not be easy. In his time, covering those 16,000 miles through some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, not knowing what he would encounter, required enormous courage and strength of will. What inspired him to brave the unknown and keep going for eighteen years, and what did he inspire in others? Was it the same faith that had sustained Grandmother? How did he maintain his equanimity and remain indifferent to flattering royalty and aggressive bandits? How did he manage to achieve