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Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo for Oslo? Vietnam Rewrites Vietnamese-Australian History
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 Helene Chung on Ching Chong with Annette Shun Wah, ABC 24/6/08
2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, relaxing with He Xintong,
I had the privilege of meeting the dissident Liu Xiaobo at his home in Beijing and am thrilled he’s been named Nobel Peace Laureate 2010, but I doubt he’ll be released in time to receive his prize in Oslo. He’s serving an eleven-year sentence for his role in Charter 08, which calls for greater human rights and free elections in China. He may not be the only absentee from the ceremony as various countries weigh the pros and cons of honouring a courageous individual and offending China. Some may simply kowtow to Beijing. That’s realpolitik. Liu is no newcomer to prison. On the night of the 3-4 June massacre in 1989 he was on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, in support of the pro-democracy demonstrators. That earned him two years behind bars. He served another six months in the mid-1990s and was jailed for similar ‘criminal’ activity from 1996 to 1999. Fortunately – for him and for me – he was enjoying a spell out of prison during my visit on the thirteenth anniversary of the massacre in June 2002. Tiananmen Square was virtually empty on 4 June as China contested the World Cup and Chinese throughout the country watched China versus Costa Rica on giant outdoor screens in summer’s sweltering heat. The screen in my hotel room showed a report on another dissident, Xu Wenli, founder of the short-lived China Democracy Party. CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz was interviewing Xu’s wife, He Xintong, who had staged a hunger strike outside her home to campaign for her husband’s release from jail. He had contracted hepatitis-B and needed urgent medical treatment. Jaime put me in touch with this brave retired teacher and she invited me to her home, a modest place in an old rundown compound where she single-handedly ran her Save Xu Wenli campaign. Despite her lack of English and my lack of Mandarin, we managed to communicate. I remember feeling tears running down my cheeks when she held up the poster of her handsome husband against her face for me to photograph. I felt for her and her loss. After she sat me down to a delicious sticky black rice dessert, which I spooned slowly into my mouth to enjoy every morsel, she picked up a Chinese-language book, showed me the cover image of Liu Xiaobo and asked, ‘Would like to meet him?’ Liu Xiaobo! One of my heroes. We were quickly out the door and into a taxi, travelling through a jungle of high-rise concrete and steel, before climbing flights of stairs in a new modern apartment block and knocking on a door. In a spacious light-filled unit lined to the ceiling with books, He Xintong introduced me to Liu, happy in shorts and T-shirt, and his spirited young wife, artist Liu Xia. Our arrival had interrupted their afternoon in front of the box watching the World Cup while Liu smoked countless cigarettes. ‘Are you interested in soccer,’ Liu asked me. Even though hooked on soccer, Liu welcomed his friend and this strange antipodean into his home, where I revelled in the sight of two so-called subversives enjoying the simple pleasures of life, relaxed in armchairs, sipping tea, laughing and watching the telly. In Melbourne on Christmas Day 2002 I learned from the radio news that He Xintong had succeeded in her Save Xu Wenli campaign. Her husband was released, and the couple joined their daughter in the United States for a life in exile. Eight years on, Xu is a senior fellow at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, while his fellow dissident, now Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo is incarcerated. I applaud China’s progress in raising the living standard of so many of its 1.3 billion people. But to rise to the rank of great world leader China needs to tolerate freedom of expression and to allow a great Chinese individual like Liu Xiaobo to speak his mind. Why is the authoritarian regime so afraid? Why are the unelected leaders of the People’s Republic afraid of the peoples’ voice? (November 2010) Vietnam Rewrites Vietnamese-Australian History
‘This was the first tank,’ I protested, pointing to the Russian-built No 843, which I saw as ‘Neil’s’ tank’. I recalled Tim Bowden’s best-selling One Crowded Hour, documenting his fellow Tasmanian’s euphoria and anxiety as he positioned himself on the palace lawn on 30 April 1975. As the first tank pushed the wrought-iron gates Davis ran towards it, his camera the only one rolling. Although assumed to be American, he established his Australian identity and continued filming. Afterwards, because the trailing official Communist crew failed to film the event, he gave a copy of his story to the new Vietnamese government. Then iIn 1984 Davis squatted atop 843 for a photograph in Hanoi’s War Museum, before the tank was returned to Saigon. Perhaps Vietnam can’t acknowledge an Australian role because Davis switched from British-Australian-owned Visnews to NBC so this was American footage. And with two-thirds of Vietnam’s 86 million under 30, this is ancient history. I wanted to visit Vietnam partly because Davis determined the course of my career. While covering the Indo-China War in Saigon and elsewhere in 1970, he wrote letters to me - some of them reproduced in Ching Chong China Girl - in which this fair-haired son of a Tasmanian farmer dissuaded this fourth-generation Tasmanian Chinese from heading straight to London: ‘First, report from Asia.’
This Hanoi Duck is nothing like my image of Peking Duck, which is served as slivers of crisp roasted skin, placed on a wafer-thin pancake, and rolled with scallions and plum sauce into a delectable package. As ABC Peking correspondent in the 1980s, I was once obliged to feast on this four times in a single week. Westerners called the duck restaurant near Capital Hospital the ‘Sick Duck’. Despite less than hygienic conditions as this Hanoi Duck is prepared, for me it conjures no connotation of sickness. It’s an image of enterprise: a plucky pony-tailed Vietnamese youth absorbed in her task beside a battered motor scooter in a nation fast honk-honking, weaving, cycling and seizing every opportunity on the road to modernization. I caught her and the pink and white-dotted masked rider through the window of my passing bus on the busy stretch from Hanoi to the Museum of Ethnology. (February 2010)
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Christmas Day, Melbourne 2011
