The book cover shows the same place 24 years apart.
The author of a new book contrasting first-hand accounts of China in the 1980s versus the modern era will be in central Iowa for an event tonight.
Patti Isaacs first visited China in 1981 on a one-year contract to teach English at a small university, just a few years after the death of Chairman Mao.
“The place where we went was in the interior of China and it was slow to adopt and the life we were experiencing was kind of the last days of real communism in China,” Isaacs says. “People were wearing uniform clothing and the government supplied you with your housing and your childcare and food ration coupons and assigned you a job.”
Twenty-four years later, Isaacs had an opportunity to return to that same university to teach English — and to do research for her book, “The Second Long March, Memoir from a Witness to China’s Transformation.” She says the changes were obvious and astonishing between 1981 and 2005.
“We were landing at night and I didn’t even know there was a city because the lights were off,” Isaacs says, “and when I went back, there were freeways and a high-tech zone with high-rise buildings and a brand new airport. It was just a enormous change in a really short period of time.”
Patti Isaacs. (photo supplied)
Many books on China are missing the human connection, which Isaacs says she strives to provide in her book. She says we tend to see foreigners as stereotypes, while the memoir tells the stories of, in her words, regular people.
“I hope it breaks down some attitudes that we have about China as this monolithic place where everybody agrees with the government and falls in line,” Isaacs says. “When you get to know people on a one-to-one basis, the Chinese people kind of want the same thing we do. They want to make a decent living and have their kids do okay and not have to worry about getting sick.”
Distinctions must be drawn, she says, when discussing government policy versus people’s attitudes toward what’s taking place. Interviewed more than two decades apart, she says some Chinese residents welcome the new comforts, and the freedom to travel more, however, there was an undercurrent.
“A lot of them have ambivalence because the modernization of China has, they feel like it’s made them kind of lose their soul,” Isaacs says. “They feel like people are more cutthroat and less community- and family-oriented, but on the other hand, they have a real sort of national pride in what China has done.”
Isaacs is a native of Beloit, Wisconsin, who now lives in Stillwater, Minnesota. She’s appearing at 6:30 tonight to read from her book and take questions at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines.