Kitsch Kills

BEIJING -- One thing industrialization has brought to China is a standardization of tourist crap.The same assemblage of fat Buddha statues, cheap metal coins and chops are for sale at attractions from the Mongolian border to Vietnam.

That predictability meant I wasn't surprised that the tiny alley market off Wangfujing Street hadn't changed in the three years since my last visit. The only noticeable new product was a pair of shiny stones, which somehow boomeranged and whistled when thrown in the air.

I came with a couple friends, capping off a rare day of sightseeing in Central Beijing. I have a certain affinity for Chinese kitsch, but having already purchased a good chunk of this stuff in 2004 I only observed this time. It was the first time for everyone else, and they slowly examined the items on display.

"Are you going to buy a Little Red Book?" I asked one of them, idly making conversation.

"No, I don't think so," he said, with just a hint of disgust.

The conversation quickly moved from there, but I became concerned at my own suggestion. Was it appropriate to encourage people to buy copies of something associated with the Cultural Revolution?

My own copy of the Little Red Book is sitting in my closet in Albany, next to a plastic drum and a crumbled entrance ticket to the Xi'an terracotta warriors. It came from Hong Kong's Temple Street Night Market, a series of clothing stalls, porn booths, fortune tellers and tiny seafood shops that comes together after sunset in the middle of Kowloon. I found my copy at a small antique place, underneath a pile of new English, German and Cantonese translations.

The newer copies use cheap plastic, but the older ones use a higher-quality leather. The book was worn, with many passages inside underlined and Chinese notes in the margin. I talked down the price, pointing out these deficiencies to the shop owner. The book cost about $5.

The big draw is a supposed collection of quotes from Mao Zedong. In reality many of these quotes were heavily edited before appearing in the text, but these edited entries were used as a gospel in a religion that condemned hundreds of thousands of people to death. The words themselves are certainly not responsible -- just as in the Bible, many of the quotes are vague enough to be bent in any particular direction -- but the Book represents an awful era. (What exactly does "every Communist working in the mass movements should be a friend of the masses and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician," from Chapter 28 mean?)

And I think the book is less a Pop Artifact than some of the other artifacts from this era sold in the country. The propaganda posters represent a separate and important style, and I have fewer problems with their presence in American college dorm rooms than with that book in my closet.

I know enough Chinese history that the words "Cultural Revolution" bring to mind images of suffering, torture and death, but it can be hard to rectify this with the excitement of a Beijing market, where vendors encourage you to take a piece of this era home. I can only hope next time I have the smarts to say, "no thanks."