This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
During this time, part of my mind and body is wrapped up in the war between Ukraine and Russia, sometimes excited, sometimes frustrated, sometimes arguing with close friends who have different opinions. Sometimes my daughter comes up to me and asks me what’s on the video. If it doesn’t show overly violent and brutal footage, I show her things like burning tanks, missile strikes and prisoners of war. She asks who is fighting who. I said that a group of Russians had run into a Ukrainian home to fight. I thought about saying there’s a big bad guy named Putin, but intuitive experience made me avoid the good guy bad guy question.
My daughter is 7 years old and she grew up in a time of abundance of goods and information explosion. She is much more fortunate than the refugees in Ukraine and Afghanistan who need to flee, but what about the future?
The current war is the closest mankind has come to a third world war. The world’s major Powers are all involved, the pillars of the current international order are collapsing and the risk of nuclear contamination is rising. Our daily lives will inevitably be affected by this war and its aftermath, only a matter of time. The impact is also naturally more than just a 1 or 2 dollar increase in gas prices. It may take the next 20 or 30 years for people to digest the consequences of this event. In this sense, Kiev is much closer to us than we think.
I want to talk to my child about this big event that may be relevant to her future, but how far to go if I do is the question.
First of all, I have to find the point that she can accept, I have to make her really interested in the topic. Coincidentally, the bedtime story I read to my daughter in the past two days was “The Adventures of Tintin – The Blue Lotus”. The story is set in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of China. One of the stories is about Japanese agents in Shanghai blowing up a railroad, smearing it as the work of Chinese thugs, and then inciting public opinion as Japan sends troops to invade Shanghai to maintain order. The story has too many flaws, and some parts are more awkward than a martial arts novel. But my daughter loved reading it. I realized that for her, the narrative logic and authenticity of the story are not important, but whether Tintin’s actions are exciting enough, fun enough, or even juggling enough. I think my daughter’s attitude towards real war is similar to her attitude towards the adventures of Tintin.
Secondly, I don’t want to talk to her about the background knowledge of the Russo-Ukrainian war at all. I’ve always felt that some parents place too much value on knowledge. They want their children to be able to name the characteristics of the 15 types of dinosaurs and the era in which they lived, to remember that the Second World War started on a certain date and ended on a certain date, and to memorize the Latin names of the nine planets. But I think what’s missing in today’s children is an awareness and love of everyday life. Parents want their children too much to have a well-developed brain and a wealth of knowledge so that they can get into a good university and possibly have a social status in the future. But they neglect the needs of their children’s physical and mental feelings. Besides, a child under the age of 10 has a limited capacity for abstract thinking, and it is unlikely that she will understand what a sovereign state, imperialism, and aggression are. What does it mean to her to memorize places with the names of two countries, Ukraine and Russia. Not to mention the fact that there’s something going on here that adults don’t even wholeheartedly understand.
Where war and education are connected, perhaps, is that for both, the least important thing is knowledge.
I have some intuitive feelings about war myself.
In my eyes, war has never been a grand duel scene in a movie or television production, not a battle of wills between heroic sons and daughters. Those grand narratives, exuberance, and pathos are far from being able to catch up with the real physical and mental pain. War is not so much a drama of ups and downs as it is anxiety, boredom, and torment in the vast majority of moments. War is a tragedy through and through. Whoever starts a war is the culprit who opens Pandora’s box.
Twenty years ago, in Lebanon, I visited a Palestinian refugee camp south of Beirut. That camp was the result of the first war in the Middle East, when the first generation of refugees fled their homes in 1948 and migrated from the area of British Palestine, where they have been stateless residents ever since. In the camp there were little girls begging and showing me the mange on her head. There were little boys who looked at me hostilely with iron pipes and shouted at the top of their lungs. There were also old men who had spent their entire lives in the camps, selling Arabic meat loaf on the streets. I thought about how those children can actually see the outside world through the TV, but have no way to have the freedom that their Lebanese peers enjoy. Lebanon itself is a country where the ruins of war are everywhere. Another time I was walking along the streets of Beirut, looking at the single-hole, patchy walls, and turned my head to see an older woman hanging her clothes out to dry. She would have been an elementary school student before the war started. For her, the war ended, but the consequences of the war, kept on happening.
Ten years ago, I went to Libya for an interview and took an airplane from Benghazi to the capital, Tripoli. The ruler of Libya at that time, Gaddafi, had just fled from his palace, the Azizia Barracks, and was nowhere to be found. The plane landed, and I looked out the window, and there was no airport out there, no tower, just endless desert, with a crowd of waiting passengers standing next to each other waiting to board the plane from Tripoli to Benghazi. In retrospect, that was my most direct experience of the atmosphere of a war in progress.
It’s about 140 kilometers from the makeshift airport in the desert to Tripoli. A few of us traveling in a pickup truck made our way there, passing a checkpoint on the way. The checkpoint was at a three-way intersection with three or four guards. Their responsibility was to register all passing vehicles. The guards, who described themselves as being around 16 years old, were wearing AC Milan uniforms and slippers. In their hands were submachine guns. We had the opportunity to pose for a photo with the guns, and the moment I walked towards the teenage soldiers, a strong sense of repulsion, disgust and fear suddenly appeared in my mind. It suddenly occurred to me that by pointing the gun at someone else and using a single force on my finger, I could decide whether another person lived or died. It didn’t matter if the person holding the gun was me or the 16 year old teenager.
Since then I’ve known I’m unlikely to touch a gun. I could feel a strong physical and mental aversion to hot weapons.
The other day, I actually had the urge to share with my daughter the past experience of spectating war. I wanted to show her the pictures I took at the time and tell her that we humans are very good at killing each other. I wanted her to be able to understand that humans are one of the few species of mammals in the world that are capable of slaughtering their own kind, and in a variety of ways. The complexity of human nature lies in the fact that an individual can have all kinds of knowledge, can be well versed in Tolstoy, send cute emoticons in chat apps, and can be a good father and mother at the same time while at the same time killing another of their own kind whom they have never met. I also want to tell my daughter that our daily lives can be easily overthrown in times of war. Food, drinking water, and shelter can all become an issue. The most important thing I hope to pass on to my daughter is how I once felt about war, about weapons.
However, I finally gave up. It’s the same old problem, a child less than 10 years old, just looking at the photos, she feels very limited, and I can’t understand too complicated background.
Quite by chance, I swiped a couple videos on WeChat. One video is a series of monologues by a Chinese man living in Ukraine. The main character’s name is Wang Jixian, a Beijinger. His expression, in my opinion, echoes the ancient lyricist Yuan Haoqian’s line, “When you’re in the vicissitudes of life, you’re in the vicissitudes of life”. He talks to the camera about air-raid sirens, grocery shopping, and how he gets along with his friends, in an emotional and touching way. I think this kind of Chinese is the most powerful and vivid Chinese of our time. The redundancy, repetition, and incoherence in his expression are not a problem, but make the whole expression more vivid, more vivid than the kind of energy-filled rhetorical and creative lines in Hollywood blockbusters. I shared the video with my daughter. Let her listen to how a very period genuine living person speaks.
The other video was about Russian POWs. It was a group of Russian POWs filmed by Ukrainians. The POWs were standing in the mud, munching on dry food, having a gossipy conversation about how they were stuck here and no one cared. The conversations are not really very informative, there is no hate, no crying, no judgment, just questions like where is your head, how many of you are there, how long have you been here and so on. It’s also underacted. Because it looks too muddled from the setting, the lines and the state of the people’s expressions. The video shows the most detailed and real state of frontline soldiers. This state is just the opposite of what is played out in the movie, and there is no drama at all. What it shows is a group of tired, bewildered living people.
These videos are the ones that I think are the most special and appropriate to show children in this war. In the past, most of the time about war, we go around and feel it through the media. But this war is different, the popularity of smartphones and wireless networks has allowed a large number of more fragmented short videos to spread. Some videos are deliberate and sensationalized, but there is also this kind, which can present the truest human condition. I believe that watching this kind of video is helpful for my daughter to experience the war.
Two books had a profound impact on how I talked to my kids about war. So influential that I would use the cases in the books as a reference for my own decisions about whether or not to talk to my kids and how to do it. One of the books in particular, I Grew Up in Iran.
In 2003, Iranian author Mazen Shatabi’s autobiographical novel, I Grew Up in Iran, was published in France. It was one of the world’s hottest books about life in the Islamic world after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In American high schools, it is used as a reference required book for classroom exploration.
The novel is written in the form of a graphic narrative, which can be interpreted as a comic strip. The book chronicles the author’s daily routine growing up from the age of eight to fourteen. What makes this routine unique is that the author was living in Tehran, the capital of Iran, and experienced the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, the establishment of the Islamic Republican regime, and the Iran-Iraq war, which claimed millions of lives.
So the value of this book is not only in unveiling another mysterious civilization to readers in the non-Islamic world, but also in sharing how to raise and educate children in times of turmoil and war.
For example, will the 14 year old babysitter who marched 8 year old Mazen down the street go home and get a beating. The answer is yes. According to the book, that was the only time the mother slapped her daughter on the cheek. The reason was that there was a massacre near where her daughter was marching. Should parents go to a protest at a school where the teachers demanded that the children pound their chests every morning in honor of the martyrs who died on the front lines. The answer was that they would. A group of parents went to the school and protested by pointing at the teacher’s nose. Should daughters be shunned when their political prisoner buddies, freshly released from prison, visit their homes to tell how they were whipped in their cells and so-and-so was executed and dismembered. The answer was no. Little Mazen listens on, picturing in her head adults being dismembered like toy figurines, all their joints broken off and neatly laid out on the floor.
For the Mazen family, it’s not a question of whether or not to tell their children about the war; war is part of everyday life, food shortages, air raid sirens. Mothers and daughters embrace each other as their neighbors’ homes are bombed out of existence. The suffering is real and cannot be avoided. At the hairdresser’s, the mother would tell her 14-year-old daughter that the family’s ancestral motto was that when a wave hits, just keep your head down and let it pass.
I admire the courage and parenting skills of Mazen’s parents. They don’t care about avoiding their daughter when talking about all those grown-up topics and harsh realities, because they are able to give her respect and love, so that she can get strong energy from them to support her soul.
In contrast to Mazen Shatabi’s parents, Israeli writer Amos Oz’s parental choices were quite different. On the second page of Oz’s autobiographical novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness, he writes that his parents could read sixteen or seventeen texts and speak eleven languages (all with Russian accents). Mother spoke four or five languages and could read seven or eight. When they didn’t want me to understand their conversations, they talked in Russian or Polish. (This was mostly the case. Occasionally, when my mother mentioned Dumas in Hebrew in front of me, my father would angrily snarl at her in Russian: What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the child is right there?) For cultural reasons, they mostly read German and Hebrew books and probably dreamed in Yiddish. But they only taught me Hebrew. Maybe they were afraid that knowing multiple languages would make me tempted by the marvelous and lethal continent of Europe.
The Oz family’s experience was different from that of the Mazen family. The Oz family’s parents were Eastern European Yutes who escaped with their family before they were put in concentration camps by the Nazis and hid in settlements around Jerusalem. The parents were humanistic intellectuals with deep roots in European humanism. In fact Oz’s uncle, a teacher who taught European literature at the university, chose to stay in his hometown and ended up in the incinerator. In other words, Oz’s parents were faced with an extremely horrific and dystopian reality; the civilization they loved was slaughtering them. So they need to build walls between their child and themselves. They need to make their child a new kind of human, one that cuts against the glorious civilization of old Europe.
Oz’s parents don’t talk much about war with Oz, but they give Oz the same power to have his own territory and be king in the cramped reality. In my eyes, I fear that Oz’s parents faced even greater challenges than Mazen’s parents.
Both books are fiction, but both are based on real history. I am sure that today’s U.S.-Russian war will give birth to its literature in the future as well. We all hope that this war will end quickly and that human society in the 21st century will not be as turbulent as it was in the first half of the last century. However, I sometimes really think about the world of 100 years ago. the global middle class of the 1920s enjoyed a soaring quality of daily life. They saw people’s daily lives becoming more convenient and efficient. in 1927, Ford stopped production of the Model T, which had produced a whopping 17 million cars. Zweig published the German edition of his global bestseller, When the Stars Shine for Mankind. General Motors put the first residential refrigerator on the market, and the quality of daily meals for city dwellers finally took a quantum leap from the ancients. The year before that the granddaddy of modern integrated kitchens was unveiled in Frankfurt. It was almost the culmination of the Belle Époque of the modern age and the invention of the basic measure of modern urban life. 2 years later, in 1929, the Great Depression broke out, followed by a world war with no bottom in sight. In history textbooks, the Great Depression refers to the great global economic depression of 1929-1933, and World War II was the global military conflict of September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945. But for the lives of ordinary people, the two are not distinct, and there is not a referee or a director on hand to shout beginning and end. For ordinary people, the days began their descent from 1929, eased, and descended again until a generation’s youth, enthusiasm and hope were boiled dry by the bitter days. Yet will its lessons be remembered by future generations? It shall not be known.
I certainly don’t want my daughter to have to face such a future. My youth caught up with the opening of China and the abundance of a consumer society. My father, an old man of the third generation, regretted the dystopia of the times for the rest of his life. I was lucky compared to the previous generation, and naturally I want my next generation to be even luckier.
Wish her luck.
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