Two Innocents in Red China. Pierre Elliot Trudeau
wits or strength of limb, but on a force completely beyond his control: the kindness of strangers.
In 1949, the old empires still exerted much influence across the globe. But as Europe’s great colonial armies gradually withdrew and its bureaucracies waned, its influence had weight only in the capitals, among the educated elites. The backcountry, the vast hinterland between the great cities, was the realm of the huddled masses. In 1949, any Westerner who got off a train in rural Iraq, India, Afghanistan or China found him- or herself face to face with the fragility of empire. The moral standards of the European metropole could not be invoked in the Arabian Desert, on the Khyber Pass or on the foggy banks of the Brahmaputra.
For the first time, my father had to perceive himself as an other.
It is on this trip that I believe my father really began to learn about innocence. For it is not the self-sure know-it-all who attracts the help of strangers, but the humble pilgrim in search of enlightenment. It is not a display of rigid principles that will invite kindness, but a display of vulnerability and openness. Thus he learnt the final and most difficult life lesson: to survive, one sometimes needs to be soft and supple, not hard.
I have also come to believe that no place made this clearer to my father than China. China was the tipping point. In 1949, the country was in the final stages of revolution. I remember him saying that the inflation was so bad that people had to bring wheelbarrows full of money to the market to pay for vegetables. Multitudes were starving. Crime was rife. There were no certainties, all was flux. In such an ancient and complex land, this chaos must have been totally overwhelming. By then, China had become all but completely detached from any outside world order. It was on its own. No education had prepared my father to begin to grasp how the revolution would conclude. The experience left him with a profound sense of awe for China, a mix of both fear and respect.
As much as he could, he moved through the pulsating chaos with the grace and litheness of a spirit. In other places, the paternalistic arrogance of foreigners prompted amusement or even gentle solicitude, but in China in the final throes of violent revolution, it only led to isolation, even hostility. My father could not be safe without the benevolence of the Chinese. He had to suspend his judgement, surrender it his dominion and accept China on its own terms.
This awe, this suspension of judgement towards China, never totally left him. Long before our family trip, my father had been forced to regard China as a great nation. China must not be sermonized, he concluded. The West’s impact on the world in the last few centuries may have been significant, but China has had an immense influence on the world for many more centuries.
China loathes outside interference. It won’t soon forget the humiliating treatment it received from the Western colonial powers in the two centuries preceding the Communist revolution. China also despises being judged. The Chinese have great respect for the tremendous intricacies of their age-old society. In everything Chinese, there are meanings behind meanings and incredibly subtle nuances and mysteries. The Chinese do not stand for outsiders passing quick judgement on things that we simply cannot understand.
His first trip to China had already made my father an innocent. His journey with Hébert would provide him with an occasion to preach open-mindedness to his fellow French Canadians by professing and promoting that innocence. Rising to address our Chinese hosts about the tragic incidents at Tiananmen, he was demonstrating that innocence once again, this time to his family. In his mind, Tiananmen was an aberration. Yet who was he to teach any lessons to China?
As a Canadian, my father was a stalwart defender of individual rights. He was a great believer in Canada’s parliamentary democracy—“the most civilized of governments,” he would say. He labelled himself a champion of the “Just Society,” which he thought was the only real objective a public figure could pursue. At home, he judged threats to and abuses of individual human rights very harshly. Yet he often seemed strangely philosophical when confronted with radically different values and systems of government. When he encountered these abroad, he sometimes remained silent about very obvious deviations from his own fiercely held convictions.
Yet for him, goodness and justice were not just subjective and personal—they were absolute. At heart, my father was no moral relativist. He truly believed that a free-market democracy (with a strong and socially engaged central government) was the system best able to guarantee the rights of individuals to pursue justice and goodness. Yet he also had tremendous patience, sympathy even, for systems and societies that had made (or borne) radically different choices.
Did China reveal my father to be an incomplete absolutist? A part-time Platonist? Or was he an absolutist only in theory and a relativist in practice? Could the traveller claim a metaphysical innocence? Was it possible to journey beyond one’s most unquestionable truths and then return to their safety without endangering them? Such enigmas are really at the core of innocence, and of my father’s fascinating and enigmatic love affair with China.
CHINA IS A VERY different place now than it was in 1960. When Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert touched down in Beijing, they were entering one of the most isolated countries in the world. It was feared. It was poor. It was unknown.
Nowadays, China’s lightning-fast ascent and increasing impact on the world have become clichés. Simply put, China is a global superpower. Its appetite for resources and its astounding manufacturing capacity are transforming the planet’s economies. China is no longer the mysterious, distant and inaccessible pariah it was for several long decades after the 1949 revolution. These days, fortunes are being made in China on a daily basis. The intrepid adventurer has been all but replaced by the mundane business traveller and the pedestrian tourist.
But the lessons on how to travel found in Two Innocents are no less relevant today. China is still not an easy place to understand. One can meander the country soaking up the sights, as millions now do every year. They walk along the Great Wall, marvel at the Forbidden City and travel down the Yangtze. But they still have a hard time understanding what modern China is all about.
China can be frustratingly opaque. It is among the most inwardly directed societies on Earth. It moves fast and furiously, without explanation. China doesn’t stop for the Chinese and it certainly doesn’t stop for the foreigner. It can be downright overwhelming.
All foreign lands are puzzles. They reduce the freshly arrived traveller to a kind of innocence, a childlike state in which the basics of communication and movement have to be relearnt. In many parts of the world that alienation is relatively mild; in China, it is extreme. The sheer size of the place, the frenzy of activity, the deep detachment from Western ways make its puzzles much more difficult to solve, their every clue that much harder to discern.
Whether in 1960 or now, the outsider who seeks to understand China from scratch is faced with China’s three opacities. The most obvious barrier, the first opacity, is language. Few people speak any Indo-European tongue there, and outside Beijing and Shanghai, very little is written in English. Furthermore, the official language, Mandarin, is not easy to understand and is spoken fast in a variety of accents and dialects.
Things get lost in translation in China. Hébert and Trudeau constantly made mention of the difficulties of translation and went through a number of translators, French and English. During our family trip of 1990, my brother and I made a game of tracking the times our father’s gentle sarcasms were translated literally, causing confusion amongst our Chinese hosts. Sometimes we even pointed out the misunderstandings to him and urged him to make it clear that we didn’t actually mean to walk fifty kilometres to a temple or that the previous night’s lavish banquet had not in fact been “a tad informal.”
A translator is a kind of filter, someone who interprets and edits meaning while transmitting it. Too easily, he or she becomes an unwanted mediator. Communication and understanding find their surest foundations in a connection between personalities, in a trust built between traveller and host. And the true foundations of trust— our emotions, humour and anger—are often left out in a translated conversation. As they are squeezed through the dehumanizing prisms of translation, conversations are reduced to bland exchanges of information.
The second opacity of China is its totalitarian system. Much has changed since 1960, but the country