Before her first trip to America 11 years ago, Chinese writer Geling Yan had to do some paperwork for her sponsor, the U.S. Information Agency. “They had me fill out a form of who I wanted to see,” says Yan. “I put all these big shots’ names. I didn’t know that it was not possible to arrange that kind of meeting, so I didn’t see any of them. I was a big fan of Faulkner and Salinger and Fitzgerald, and I was very fond of Catch-22 because I was from the Chinese army, [where] there was a certain amount of absurdity.”
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Yan had joined the People’s Liberation Army as a dancer in 1971, when she was 12. She toured along the Tibetan frontier in the Szechuan province performing numbers like “The Red Detachment” where “all the girls are holding rifles and kicking legs….Part of our purpose was to brainwash the Tibetans and to comfort the Chinese troops,” who she says teased her troupe of artists as “sissy soldiers.”
Armed with a scholarship, Yan came to Columbia College and earned a master’s in fiction writing in 1990. Her American classmates were quite different from her colleagues in China. “They don’t have that sense of mission that we had,” she says. But what Americans lack in collective idealism they make up for in creative independence. “Individualism can break all the borders of different ideologies and different cultures. So with the individualism I learned in this country, I put more focus on examining human nature and the human condition rather than society.”
Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl opens Friday at the Village Theatre, 1548 N. Clark (312-642-2403). –Bill Stamets
