Hilary Spurling

Surviving Mao’s China

In a series of lively paintings, Rao Pingru recalled happy family occasions, making decades of privation easier to bear

Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive upheavals that marked China’s transition in the 20th century from an immemorial, apparently immutable imperial past to its current uneasy truce with the technology, morals and politics of the Western world.

He was born in Nancheng, a city virtually unchanged in seven centuries since the end of the great Song dynasty. The first painting in this book shows Pingru himself as a small boy kneeling to knock his head on the floor in a traditional kowtow, performed at the foot of the man who had come to teach him to write. In ancient China, calligraphy embodied continuity, discipline, the accumulated wisdom of civilisation itself.

Pingru tells his story from the bottom up, so to speak, documenting a life lived against a background of constant chaotic destruction in small lively paintings that are hard to resist. He looks back to his grandfather, whom he never met, painting him in the voluminous yellow silk robes of a mandarin at the imperial court: a squat, almost square emblem of absolute power.

From the start Pingru pictures himself as a wide-eyed, owlish, bespectacled observer of the shifting contemporary scene. His father was a provincial lawyer, and he himself grew up in a society still regulated by the rhythm of seasonal street festivals, celebrated with feasting, fireworks and highly competitive homemade paper lanterns in the shape of dragons or lions.

He paints the house he lived in with its courtyards, Buddhist shrine and walled garden in a world where transport meant push-carts or carrying poles. He paints his parents’ rice bowls, which he had to fill at every meal. He paints the family at table, and the food he loved as a child: meatballs, mooncakes, glutinous rice dumplings and steamed rolls filled with sweet potato noodles.

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