Dwarkesh Patel: recommendation

Transcript context

…that was when I was 23. But of course, we were at the port eagerly awaiting our sailors, and we had no idea what must be on their minds, how different this must be from their expectation of port life. In 1976, Mao died and China began to change. And in 1978, there was a national exam to select people to go abroad for the first time under Communist rule. Going abroad was based on an academic basis, so I did very well in the exam. So I became one of the first 14 people to come to Britain. And as far as I know, I was the first person to get out of Sichuan Province, a province then, of 90 million people to come and study in the west. So when I got my doctorate in linguistics at the University of York in 1982, I became the first person from Communist China ever to get a doctorate from a British university. Okay, so I was in Britain, and for ten years, I didn't want to think about the past because it was too painful, and my father died, my grandmother, who brought us up, died, and I just wanted to spend time enjoying the west. I had actually always wanted to be a writer. When I was a child, I loved writing. But when I was growing up under Mao, it was impossible to dream of even becoming a writer, because nearly all writers were condemned, sent to the Gulag, driven to suicide. Some were even executed. Even writing for oneself was dangerous. I wrote my first poem when I was 16. On the 16th birthday in 1978, I was lying in bed polishing my poem when I heard the door banging and some Red Guards had come to raid our flat. And if they had seen my poem, I would get into trouble and my family would get into trouble. So I had to quickly rush to the bathroom to tear up my poem and flush it down the toilet. And so that ended my first venture in writing. But the desire to write never left me. So in the following years, when I was working as a peasant and as a barefoot doctor, as a steel worker and an electrician, and when I was spreading manure on the paddy fields and checking electricity supplies on top of the electricity poles, I was always writing in my head with an imaginary pen. But I couldn't write in China. When I came to Britain, for ten years, I didn't want to write. And then my mother came to stay with me in 1988, and for the first time, she told me the stories of her life and stories of my grandmother. And then while I was listening to my mother, I thought, I must write all this down. And then I realized how much I wanted to be a writer and how much I had always wanted to be a writer. And so after my mother left, I transcribed the tapes. She left for me 60 hours of tape recordings. And then I wrote 'Wild Swans', which was published in 1991 first. And I became a writer. Yes. Saying you became a writer is understating it. The global impact of 'Wild Swans' has been tremendous. A former guest of mine, Sarah Payne, recommended it to me, and I read it. And it's the most moving book I've ever read. It's truly tremendous. Let me begin by asking, what it was like growing up there in terms of the psychology of living in a totalitarian system? You mentioned in the book that until very late, you could not even bring yourself to question Mao, despite seeing the consequences of his policies and the cult of personality that was there. Tell me about the psychology of living in a system like that. Well, when I was growing up in China, we were all subject to intense brainwashing and indoctrination. When we were children, Mao was - we were - sorry, Mao was like our God. If we wanted to say what I say is true, we would say, "I swear to Chairman Mao." So Mao had been given this godlike status. And also, at the same time, we could see how dangerous it was to question Mao. In China, there were these periodical political campaigns, and many people were victimized. And the biggest crime was to question Mao. And my father, in the Cultural Revolution, suffered tremendously, and it was also because he questioned Mao. So when I wrote my poem when I was 16 years old, I'd already started to doubt and to dread the society I was in. We were always told socialist China was paradise on Earth. And I thought, on that day, actually if this is paradise, what then is hell? Because my parents were away being detained, my grandmother was weeping next door because she'd heard these ghastly things that were being done to my mother. So I questioned the society, but Mao never entered my mind, and he was beyond questioning. This may be difficult for people to understand, maybe in the West, but in China in those days, there were two most important things that enabled this brainwashing. One is the complete isolation of the society from the outside world, from alternative information, and from any other information. Even parents never told the children things that were different from the Party line because they were worried about the future of their children. And they were worried that if children blabbed, it would be disastrous for the children as well as for the family. So no alternative information. And the other is terror, this intense terror, which really scared people into suppressing any unorthodox thoughts. So I was living in that kind of society, and it took me a long time to question Mao since my birthday, my 16th birthday thought in 1988. For many years, I blamed what was happening in China on Madame Mao and the so-called Gang of Four, which were basically assistants of Mao's. But I never dared to question Mao. And then I remember very well in 1976, I had learned a little English, and a friend showed me a copy of Newsweek, and there was an article about Mao. And there were two little pictures with the caption "Madame Mao is Mao's eyes on Earth." And suddenly, Mao's name was spelled out for me. And I suddenly realized, of course, it was Mao. Without Mao, none of this could have happened. And Mao was responsible. And I'm an intelligent person, but it took me eight years, even from the moment I said to myself, "I dislike this society," to the moment that I felt Mao was responsible.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.