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From her first book, The Good Women of China, to last year's Miss Chopsticks, Xinran Xue has dedicated herself to documenting the lives of ordinary Chinese people. Her latest project, China Witness - a comprehensive social history of her homeland during the last century - is her most ambitious work yet. However, it has taken a personal toll on the Beijing-born 50-year-old, who lives in west London with her husband, literary agent Toby Eady.
"I was totally cut off from my friends for quite a while and when I did go back out into the public, a lot of people said to me, 'What happened to your hair?' I had to look in the mirror and my hair had gone very, very white. I mentioned it to Toby and he was like, 'I didn't dare tell you'."
China Witness focuses on the life stories of 11 individuals or families, ranging from Yao Popo, the Medicine Woman of Xingyi, to Mr Jinguan, a police officer who first entered the force just after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. The former radio talkshow host has also interviewed many other witnesses, whose tales did not make the book's final edit, since she became a journalist in the 1980s.
"I grew up in the city and was brought up with government propaganda," recalls Xinran. "The first thing we were taught was that there was no difference between the city and the countryside. So I believed that everything was equal until I made my first journey into the countryside. I was so shocked. I discovered that many of the so-called historical facts, the books that we read, and the information that we were given by government departments and the media was wrong."
Xinran was determined to discover the truth about her homeland. "The people who were in their 50s and 60s told me quite a lot about what happened before the 1940s and even the 1930s when the first Chinese fathers came back from Europe and Japan. They stood up for Chinese national pride, which was completely destroyed after the Opium Wars of the 19th century. They also worried about a language system which made communication with the West difficult."
Xinran continued to gather testimonies after moving to London in 1997. She eventually resolved to turn her research into a book after realising that many of the witnesses she had first interviewed two decades earlier were becoming elderly. Some of the more colourful characters she had met, most notably former Silk Road bandit Hu Feibao, were unable to provide full accounts due to increasing ill health.
"I told people that I am going to meet them properly this time, I am going to film and record their voices," she says.
"But more than half of them said, 'No way. We can help you to understand but we can't go public'. It took a long time to sweet-talk them around. I realised that every single one of them had never told their story to their children and I asked why. They felt guilty because their children would not understand them, so I asked them what they think of Chinese society today and what they think about their children's future."
According to the witnesses, a significant change occurred in China after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. "Everybody dedicated their lives to the country and the communist party," says Xinran.
"It was good. But they cannot understand what has happened today. Why everybody thinks America is God? All this has confused and scared them and they think the new generation has jumped the history queue."
China Witness will be published just after the conclusion of the Beijing Olympic Games, which has led to an increasingly open relationship between China and the West.
However, according to Xinran, ignorance on both sides has hampered the process.
"The Chinese are not very experienced in marketing and PR. They think that because China is a rising economic power, everybody will do business with them. But they don't realise how much people respect freedom and democracy in the West, while the West thought it was a chance to correct Chinese political views.
"On China's side, the Olympic Torch Relay was seen as a demonstration of power which, in China, is based in the military and economic forces, not the culture. But I believe that China has become a superpower based on our 5000 years of history and culture."
Xinran, who spent eight years interviewing both Tibetans and native Chinese for her second book, Sky Burial, believes that the political situation in Tibet is more complicated than portrayed by Western media.
"Nobody points out that 95 per cent of China's water resource comes from Tibet and throughout history China has mobilised against any enemy who cut it off from its water resource," she says.
"And nothing grows in Tibet - in ancient times they had to cross the Himalayas for their food, otherwise it is desert to the north. China trades with Tibet for very basic, everyday things. You cannot ignore this information and just talk about the political relationship."
MEET XINRAN
Xinran reveals the hidden China in a talk at St Columba Centre, 40 Vermont St, Ponsonby, Auckland, on September 8; tickets, via the Women's Bookshop or at the door, are $12.
* China Witness (Chatto & Windus $37.99)
