Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer and historian who heads the Chinese Collections at the British Library, known for her books on China and her claim that Marco Polo never visited.
On the island
Eight records
Buddhist Monks and Nuns of the Fo Guang Shan Temple, Taiwan
One of the things that the Buddhist faithful do to ac accrue merit is to sing or chant the sutra. And so as we play this we are accruing merit and they are accruing merit.
Ballade des dames du temps jadis
Georges Barsins was my father's perhaps favorite singer, I suppose, and so this reminds me of childhood.
it's actually it's a Lorca song, that's the main thing, that it's Paco Ibanyev singing Lorca.
Because I spent a very amazing year at Liverpool Art School in between school and Cambridge, um and Penny Lane came out that year and so it sort of symbolizes a a a magical year at art school.
Right String Baby But the Wrong Yo-Yo
I had a wonderful friend at Cambridge who ran a record shop which sold mostly completely mad blues records, and every so often he'd dash round on his bike and say, You must hear this, it's funnier than anything else.
Chinese Exercise Music
Chinese exercise music which we had to jump about to every morning.
Because when I used to do the school run, in order not to have seven children squabbling in the car, I used to play tapes. And after we'd done Just William and the complete works of Sherlock Holmes, we went on to Tom Lehrer, who was a rip-roaring success, bizarrely.
Ella giammai m'amò (from Don Carlos)Favourite
I just think it's beautiful.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:44What are the main differences that strike you between then [1971] and now about China?
Golly, the differences. I just sort of think of the view of Shanghai then, when Poodung was cabbage fields and the um the clock on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was still playing the East is red. And now you look at it and you know you've got the Pearl Tower, everything you've got lights, you've got shining, you've got giant buildings which glisten in the sun. It's completely different. Except, of course, if you get away from these major cities, I mean, and the the absolute bling, I think of it, is Peking now, but go out into the countryside and you're still back with sort of China immemorial.
Presenter asks
8:45What do you remember [as] your earliest memories of life at home?
I suppose some of my I have memories of hanging upside down on a trapeze in the garden in the sun, you know, those you have those sunny childhood memories. But I mean, the the the the Georges Prosins is one of the things, one of my memories of comfort is being upstairs and sort of meant to be going to sleep, and hearing Dad downstairs typing and Georges Prosins always playing. My brother in the same room as me, but we divided the room up with wardrobes and things like that. So we were sort of just, you know, very comfortable at home and with Georges Poisson's and the typewriter.
Presenter asks
11:29The keepsakes
The book
Various
I'd like to take the tsu hai, which is a 1930s Chinese dictionary called The Sea of Words. ... It would mean I'd carry on learning Chinese, and I'd be able to come back and be sort of, you know, the brain of 1930s China.
The luxury
war memorial outside Euston station
I'm very moved and interested by First World War memorial sculpture... I find them very intriguing.
Was politics a very active thing in the household?
It was very active, yes. I mean, as a child, the incredible drag of being compelled to deliver Labour Party notices endlessly, you know, to no financial reward. I'm sure no child would do it without money. But also, there were things like with the French kind of political connection. I can remember my parents looking after refugees from the Algerian war, you know, young men who were refusing the draft. Coming and staying through friends in France and smuggling contraceptives into France and things like that. So there were sort of international collections as collections as well.
Presenter asks
19:40Where did the study in Chinese come from, then?
A bit of a fluke, I think, really. At school I had been quite good at French and quite good at Spanish. But I decided I wanted to do a language that was as diff I said at the time, as difficult and as different as possible. I don't know why I said difficult, because I'm fundamentally fairly lazy, but different I wanted. And I'm just eternally grateful that I chose Chinese and not Arabic or Japanese, for example, because I think Chinese opens an entire world.
Presenter asks
23:36How much did you understand about [China's] recent history?
Not a terrible lot, although I think in one way, to be fair to us, I think that the the horrors of the famine had been to a large extent eclipsed by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which was still ongoing. And I mean, I think mo many people didn't know until afterwards. You know, there were there were the bodies that floated down the Pearl River to Hong Kong, but it was very difficult to know what had gone on in detail. It was very difficult, but you just towards the end of, say, July, August 76, which was when Mao was clearly on his way out and everyone was in a state of real fear as to what was going to happen, you did get a real sense of foreboding. Could that mean civil war? What was going to happen? So you did know that the whole country was on edge.
“I really wrote it because I wanted people to think more than anything else. You know, we we look at China through his eyes. We don't think what are the Chinese saying, what are they doing?”
“I prefer books to a lot of people. There are certain people um who I prefer enormously to books, but the mass, I'd much I'm always happy. I mean, yes, take a book.”
“I think English is a wonderful language, and I would I would miss that. I'd miss being at sort of the peak of a language. 'Cause if in China, I mean, I can stumble through Mamahuhu, but I mean, I wouldn't ever be quite up there at the top. I'd lo I like being able to write beautifully.”