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Wanted:
the Chinese Oprah
An advice columnist says China really needs to Talk
Across China, millions of lovelorn
students, romantic schoolgirls and sexually frustrated young professionals are
mourning my imminent departure as the Beijing correspondent of The
Daily Telegraph.
It need hardly be said that not one of
them knows who I am, nor cares. Instead, they have just bidden farewell to my
wife, Nina-Maria, who - to her slight surprise - became China's first foreign
agony aunt of the airwaves, with her own daily three-hour music radio show,
broadcast to a dozen cities, as well as magazine columns, interviews and
television profiles under her belt.
Her audience ranged from students of
English to schoolchildren, Chinese staff at foreign companies, expatriates and -
she was once discreetly informed - cadets at the Beijing police academy.
When Nina joined Easy FM, the only
national station broadcasting in English, it was a joint Sino-French venture
with the media giant Lagardere. The shows featured a parade of smooth, older
Western men, assisted by Chinese girl sidekicks. The French bosses planned to
promote Nina, with Gallic heavy-handedness, as their first Western sex kitten.
Nina resisted and, thankfully, the
Chinese audience thought they heard something different: a young woman their
age, who knew the outside world, and who might listen to them with an open mind.
In the home of the one-child policy, she could be a sister figure to lonely
girls, and a guide for young men to the mysteries of women's hearts. In a
crowded country with little tradition of privacy, she could be trusted with
painful secrets.
Like so many of China's small steps
towards openness, Nina's advice programme came about partly by accident, and was
never explicitly sanctioned. The original plan was to have a daily reading of a
cheery listener's love story, sponsored by Cadbury's. Stories duly poured in by
letter and email - hundreds every week, accompanied by poems, photographs and
paintings. But among the torrent of sweetness, there was also unhappiness. It
was like opening a window on life among the new Chinese middle classes.
China is a rapidly developing country,
where young people increasingly study and work in cities far from home. Letter
after letter spoke of tearful departures at railway stations and airports, of
relationships wrecked by distance and separation. Many revealed deep ignorance
of the opposite sex, in a society where the different generations simply do not
talk of such things and university students are officially forbidden to have
sex, on pain of expulsion.
Young Chinese wrote of intolerable
academic pressure from ambitious parents, of rows over boyfriends and
girlfriends who did not match their families' aspirations. One boy was ordered
to ditch a disabled girl; Beijing students were told not to marry provincial
partners; a young woman from Inner Mongolia was rejected because she was not
ethnically pure Chinese.
"Most of the letters were about
reading the signals from the opposite sex. Lots about falling for people on the
internet," recalls Nina. "But there were also girls worrying about
losing their virginity, and girls falling in love with married men, or
foreigners. There were boys in love with older women, and gays under family
pressure to find a wife. These stories demanded a response."
Some posed cultural dilemmas unlikely to
arise back in Britain. Two young lesbians wrote to say they were living
together, and were physically affectionate in public - and nobody had noticed.
Young Chinese of the same sex are strikingly physical with each other, and
frequently share cramped accommodation, even bedrooms, when starting out in a
big city. Should they come out to their parents, the lesbians asked?
Some letters and emails could never be
read out - one girl wrote to say she had been gang raped. Nina began writing
back to them, in private if she had to. Mostly, she began to read out problems
on air, without giving the writers' names, and to offer advice.
The job also brought fame, some of it a
little startling. She is recognised in restaurants and tailors' shops, taxis and
lifts. Once, when she was walking through a naval district in the port of
Qingdao, three female sailors called out from their guard hut. They wanted Nina
to autograph a magazine article about her, which they were reading.
She has been presented with calligraphy
by a 64-year-old man who saw her face on a bus-stop poster, and been serenaded
by 700 forestry students singing a Mariah Carey hit. Last autumn, at the
People's University of China, where she was meeting students at the Australian
Studies Centre, she was interrupted by muffled thumping, then the arrival of a
student inside a furry kangaroo suit. This, a professor gravely explained, was
Nina-Maria the Kangaroo, the centre's new official mascot.
Chinese journalists who came to
interview this new British agony aunt expressed envy of Nina's relative
freedoms. "There's a feeling that you can get away with more, broadcasting
in English," Nina says. "Chinese journalists said: 'That's because top
Communist officials can't understand English'."
This is still China, though. Nina's show
went out live, which was unusual, but there were no telephone calls from
listeners. The country has experimented with phone-in radio in the past but the
rules were tightened, reportedly after callers to stations elsewhere in the
country mentioned banned topics, including sex and the Tiananmen Square
massacre.
Censorship was more often hinted at than
imposed. Chinese bosses would murmur that "a certain word" or song had
been inappropriate. Inappropriate phrases, it emerged, included "womaniser",
and a reference to Britney Spears not wearing underwear in concert. Banned songs
included Tom Jones's Sex Bomb, though whether it was the "sex" or the
"bomb" that upset officials was unclear.
Nina's first and only brush with
political censorship came last month, as she was preparing to leave China to
move to Washington DC. "We don't like that song by the Pet Shop Boys,"
said one producer. "The political one, about the collapse of the Soviet
Union." She racked her brain. At last, he revealed he was talking about Go
West. Nina considered explaining that the song was not a hymn to Communist
defectors, but a gay disco anthem first recorded by the Village People, in
praise of San Francisco. Then she thought about explaining the Village People to
a Chinese official and changed her mind.
It is common to talk of young Chinese as
sentimental, serious and impossibly naive, and that is how they first appear.
"But I know now there's a lot simmering beneath the surface," Nina
says. "If and when the authorities allow free discussion of sex and family
problems on radio and TV, it's going to be astonishing.
"When they find the Chinese Oprah,
she's going to start her own revolution." -
by David Rennie
London
Telegrah
26 February 2002
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