The Small Legend of Xiu Xiu

Imagine that you are the daughter of one of Xiu Xiu's female compatriots at the village where they started out. You were born in 1975 in Beijing, and you have grown up there hearing the story of Xiu Xiu from your mother and her friends and acquaintances. When the Tianamen Square protests begin in 1989, you are 13. Do you take part in the protests? Why or why not? What are your thoughts about the protests against the backdrop of what you know of China's past, especially the Cultural Revolution and Xiu Xiu's experience?

One thing I would need to know before assuming the persona of a 13-year-old Chinese girl would be exactly what she heard about Xiu Xiu from her mother and her mother's friends and acquaintances. What stories did they tell? That Xiu Xiu was a whore who gave herself away to many men? That's as far as the nearest community's story went in the film, and the only person who could attest otherwise, Jao Lin, died with Xiu Xiu. Or was the reality of her situation--her desperation to return home and what she felt she was forced to do to get the paperwork to do so---seen in its proper perspective by then? Was she then used as an example of a plan gone badly awry, isolating the country's youth and in many cases separating them from their families forever? If I were to take the latter position--that Xiu Xiu was harmed by the Cultural Revolution and its need to control the country's youth with such extreme measures, and became a small legend in a small circle because of it, I would have to say that I would be among the protesters at Tianamen Square.

Being a young girl hearing the story of another young girl manipulated by nationalism, idealism, and Chairman Mao's skewed plan that meant taking and abandoning hundreds of thousands of young people all over the country after using them as a force against his enemies, I would be wary of my government, even if leadership had changed. The government's economic policies under Deng Xiaoping in 1989 favored the party "elite," distributed the country's wealth unevenly and unfairly, let workers be treated with impunity, disregarded the integrity of the land, and operated with the same corruption as that which led to Mao's takeover of the country decades before. Having that sense of idealism and the energy that comes with youth, and with the knowledge of what a government can do to its people, as in the case of Xiu Xiu, I can imagine being 13 and being swayed by rhetoric that would lead me to the Square to protest the corruption in the interest of my own and my country's future.

China is unimaginably large in both land and population, and its history has been one of internal and external conflict; its governance requires compliance on the part of the people. I would think it natural that people question their government, even if it means risking jail or worse, if that government serves its own ends rather than the people's and its corruption is evident and far-reaching. Those might not be the words a 13-year-old would use, but it certainly could be what she would feel. Knowing how ill-used Xiu Xiu was could be a further inspiration to protest against a governing power before that power controls absolutely, as it did in the Cultural Revolution (even turning children against their families, unheard of in any other time).

Yes, I would be in the Square--perhaps not brave enough to stand in front of an oncoming tank, but I would be raising my fist and shouting out, and perhaps thinking of how different things would have been for Xiu Xiu had she been allowed to have a voice in her own future as I would fight to have in mine.