The Brian Maldwyn Jones Site

Motives for writing A Welsh-Canadian in China

When I came back from China in 1990 about the first thing I told my family was that I intended to go to church. They looked at me sceptically since they had known me vary from agnosticism to atheism depending upon the amount of strong drink I had imbibed.

Their scepticism was well placed as I did not go to church. Instead, I turned to writing up my memoirs and journals into a nine hundred page manuscript. Much of it was a description of the absence of Christianity, of altruism, of kindness in the Chinese people of Harbin that I met. I was admonished for helping a  lady with her bicycle up the stairwell of an apartmnt building. `People will think you want something.` I just couldn`t believe I was hearing an argument against such a common kindness shown in Canada or anywhere for that matter.

A young man  throwing his female companion down into the snow and repeatedly doing so raised from me that I was going to stop him. The female student accompanying me argued that I shouldn`t. It didn`t say much for me since I observed her advice.

Worse was the argument by the students that they, the intellectuals, should be the only ones allowed to vote and elect the Chinese government. There was to be no vote for the peasants and industrial workers. The students`cries for democracy were largely the echoing of slogans; they did not know what democracy implied. But the western press swallowed their slogans. When I returned to Canada no one would believe my version of the Chinese student democratic movement. The few teachers who listened labelled me as the crazy Welshman.

I ws sure that no one would read those nine hundred pages. I had to turn those pages into something more readale like a novel. To give me freedom, to exercise my imagination, to do some story-telling persuaded me to turn from first person narrative to third person. I cut and cut to obtain the length of the contemporary novel.