History Heals: the significance of the untold story of “Sichuan”
When I was preparing for my TOEFL(Test of English as a Foreign Language) in Chongqing many years ago, my grandfather said he would tell me a story about English learning. At first I paid no attention. My grandfather spoke no mandarin, let alone English. How could he possibly tell me something about English learning? But I let him continue. He told me that when he was a kid(xwall, 细娃儿), there was a kid from his village who wanted to learn English. The kid then simply went to a local church and lived with the missionaries there. Several months later, he became very fluent in English. He was trying to tell me that what I needed to do was to practice English as often as I can, but I was completely shocked for a different reason. I never knew that my grandfather’s village, by any standards a tiny hamlet, could have access to native English speakers who were very rarely seen in Chongqing and many other cities in East Asia in the early 2000s.
Although I have lived in America for years, the language barrier was, and still is, a major obstacle for me, but it was/is not just English. My poor Mandarin Chinese posed an even bigger challenge for me. I grew up in Chongqing dialect of Basurian（巴蜀语重庆方言）and learned Mandarin and English in school. From a retrospective, in school we learned Mandarin as a colonial language. We were told that Mandarin is the “authentic” and standard language of the “Chinese people”, while the languages we spoke at home were simply “dialects” of Mandarin. The school, the agency of the state, clearly discriminated against the use of “dialects”. We were required to answer the teacher’s questions in Mandarin, praised for speaking good Mandarin, and encouraged to speak Mandarin at home. Needless to say, the Chinese class, 语文, was taught in Mandarin. There was, however, a serious problem for the promotion of Mandarin in schools. Only a very small number of teachers knew how to speak Mandarin in Basuria(roughly Sichuan province excluding the Kham region, Chongqing municipality and Hanzhong prefecture). In practice, nobody really spoke Mandarin in my school outside of the Chinese class, not even the teachers. Some teachers were simply too old to learn a new language and chose to teach in the Chongqing dialect. In addition, especially in high schools where students were the most rebellious, they would consider the speaking of Mandarin a kowtow to the school authority. In other words, if you want to be cool, you speak Chongqing dialect, even in Chinese classes. There was only one occasion that we would speak Mandarin willingly: to communicate and especially to flirt with classmates from other provinces外地人. But even in that case, these “outsider” classmates would pick up our language very quickly and become “insiders”. After only a couple of years, they would speak a perfect Chongqing dialect that few could tell the difference.
As a result, I spoke poor Mandarin before I left for America. I would even go so far as to say that my oral English was probably better than my oral Mandarin, as I practiced English very intensively for a year before I left. In America I met Chinese students from different provinces, and my poor Mandarin became noticeable. More importantly, the power dynamics reversed. Back in Chongqing, Mandarin was a language of the coward, the state and the outsiders, but within the small circles of the overseas Chinese students, Mandarin became a language of the educated, the cosmopolitan, and the insiders. Thus, I only felt the need to learn and speak good Mandarin after I left Chinese-occupied Chongqing.
My language barrier was thus caused by both Mandarin and English. As described before, language was an integral part of my identity formation. Consequently, I encountered an identity crisis when the power dynamics of language suddenly shifted. This coincided with my frustration with graduate school and academia in general and my struggle for meaning and purpose in life, both are still very common among college students and young adults today. Looking back, I probably had symptoms of depression and anxiety. The major problem was that: on the one hand, calling myself a ‘Chinese” certainly failed to solve my identity crisis. I despised China’s human rights violations so much that I felt repulsed to be called a “Chinese”. On the other hand, what I have learned in graduate school failed to provide an alternative answer either. Mainstream Sinology during the era of globalization generally overlooked China’s oppressive nature. Many researchers have great interest in “Chinese culture” and “China’s distinctive model of economy and politics” as if they were trying too hard to look for an alternative. For those that successfully demonstrate a more complicated understanding of China with a focus on China’s historical and contemporary problems and challenges, they fall short in providing a satisfactory solution. Extensive literature has deconstructed “Chinese-ness” or ‘Chinese identity”, but failed to construct a better replacement. In short, my crisis can be summarized in just one sentence: if I am not Chinese, who am I?
Fortunately, a combination of Taiwan’s de-sinicization, the theory of the dissolution of China promoted by Liao Yiwu, Li Teng-hui and Liu Zhongjing, and Benedict Anderson’s theory on nationalism provided a much needed solution for me. I don’t have to be Chinese. I can be a Basurian巴蜀人. More significantly, the construction of a Basu nation justifies my attachment to my mother language and my country that are discriminated against within the People’s Republic of China. I don’t have to feel ashamed about my poor Mandarin. Just after I realized that, I found that my passion and energy came back. I once again was able to enjoy learning history. I devoted much of my time and effort to re-study history from a regional perspective. The more I know, the more consolidated my new identity becomes, because the historical evidence actually suggests, as Prasenjit Duara, Stephen Platt and many others famously argued, that “a unified China” as we know today was only one of the historical possibilities. My mother language, my personal experiences and my grandfather’s story(which suggests that “Sichuan ‘’ was not a landlocked and backward province of China) all point to another historical possibility: an independent Basuria and a multinational “China”. There does not have to be one unified China. I would like to elaborate more on my grandfather’s story told in the beginning. While I now know that an independent Basuria was never “backward” or “isolated”, only recently did I realize that the history of a special group of people is largely untold: the children of the missionaries and other westerners who were born in Basuria. How did they identify themselves? What was their perspective on “Sichuan”? What happened to them after they “returned” to the west? These questions could not be answered meaningfully without a perspective from Basuria. A historical research that recognizes “Sichuan”/Basu identity would surely complicate our understanding of modern Chinese history and in a sense counter People’s Republic of China’s current imperialistic ambition.
Perhaps more importantly, the construction of a Basu identity and a Basu history can help those who suffered from the identity crisis like I did. This is urgent. One of my acquaintances from the Basurian Independence Association committed suicide several years ago because of his conflicted identities. Since then, I often think that had my messages been sent to him earlier, this tragedy would have been avoided. But looking back solves nothing. I don’t expect that this short article can solve your problems, but if your experience is similar to mine, I sincerely hope that it can address your issues and help you find your own cure.
