Past recalled
TV Host Jing Yidan’s book tracks family letters and changes in decades
“‘Have you ever seen a coupon for cloth?’ I asked a woman who was born in the 1990s,” said Jing Yidan, a former star news host on television, during the launch of her latest book Na Nian, Na Xin (That Year, That Letter) in Beijing on June 29.
In the 1960s and ’70s, times of scarcity in China, people needed to use welfare coupons to buy limitedly supplies of daily necessities such as meat, oil, rice, coal, vegetables and cloth.
“She told me she’d never seen such a coupon,” Jing, 63, says. “I want to tell those who have only seen clothes what cloth coupons are.”
To write the book, Jing sorted out information describing life in China from the 1950s up to recent years from more than 1,700 letters kept by different generations of her family in Harbin, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang province.
With the book, she wants to keep alive the memories of the older generations and the reality of the past for not only her daughter and grandchildren but also future readers.
In 1968, Jing’s parents were sent away from home during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76). At the time, her 16-year-old elder sister, who had studied till middle school, went to work on farms in the villages of Northeast China. As a result, 13-year-old Jing, the oldest child left at home, had to take care of her two younger brothers with the help of their maternal grandfather.
During Spring Festival in 1969, like many other families, Jing’s parents and elder sister could not visit home, so Jing, then 14, washed all the bedclothes and cleaned the house, while her 11-year-old brother was sent to buy food with the coupons collected for the festival.
“At that time, food was allotted according to coupons, but sometimes even with coupons one couldn’t get a certain kind of food that was limited in supply. In the snow-covered area (it was winter), he (the brother) carefully carried money and the coupons inside his pocket and went to a shop named Shisanmen time after time to buy different kinds of food. A young boy as he was, he never made a mistake,” Jing writes in her new book.
In a letter her brother wrote to their mother that Jing recalls in the book, he reported what he got: “In the month of Spring Festival, each person was allotted 0.5 kilograms of peanut, 0.1 kg sesame oil, 0.35 kg soybean oil, 6.5 kg flour and 1.5 kg rice. We must have a good festival!”
It seems trivial today, Jing says of the letter. But at the time China had a weak economy, which is why such information was relevant for families.
“That was a Spring Festival for a family without the presence of parents,” Jing continues. “I have a strong wish that all the memories about those moments should be remembered. By sharing them with younger people like my daughter, we will give them the power to build a better society.”
The current book is not Jing’s first about letters and memories. She used to be the host of a news program called Topics in Focus at China Central Television. In 1998, when the program was extremely popular for covering social problems, the production team received tens of thousands of letters from viewers.
Jing picked 150 letters and produced the book Sheng Yin (Voices) in 1998, covering hot topics of discussion in China in that time.
“The book can provide a reference to the voices of Chinese people in the late 1990s for the coming generations,” she adds.
In 2017, she published another book titled Wo, Modai Gongnongbing Xueyuan (I, the Last Generation of Worker-Peasant-Soldier Student) that recorded the years when Jing and her peers went to the countryside to work in the 1970s.
Jing says her inspiration for her latest book, Na Nian, Na Xin, came from her former colleague Cui Yongyuan’s oral history project, which seeks to keep the memories of the older generations alive.
Yu Hong, a professor of journalism and communication at Peking University, says she can relate to the book.
“With the experience of five generations of the Jing family over the last 68 years, the book also shows the close connections between individuals, families and the times,” Yu says.
In the book, with the letters and background information, Jing shows how members of the older generations fell in love, got married, what they ate and wore, how they traveled, how they celebrated holidays, what they believed in, what their dreams were, how they entertained themselves, how they received education and their strong sense of family.
“I expect the young generations will read the book and know how we arrived here today and how to continue with the journey,” Jing says.
I have a strong wish that all the memories about those moments should be remembered.” Jing Yidan, former TV host