Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (11 page)

Beside Beijing University’s No Name Lake: second from left is Fu the Enforcer; third from left is Cadre Huang; fourth from left is Erica Jen; sixth from left is me; on far right is Teacher Dai
.

Chancellor Zhou Peiyuan, who passed away in Beijing in 1993 at the age of 91. At his death, he was vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp governing body. This photo was on the cover of a propaganda magazine called
Peace.

F
u the Enforcer wordlessly handed me a printed note. I immediately picked out the words
fan geming
. “Counter-revolutionary” was the Chinese equivalent of “Run, Spot, run,” among the first words I had learned to read. It was a form letter from the post office. Three old issues of
Newsweek
my mother sent me had been confiscated as counter-revolutionary propaganda.

I was living in a hermetically sealed Maoist bubble. I had no shortwave radio, no newspapers and now, not even a stale
Newsweek
. There were no Western movies or plays. Satellite television didn’t exist. And thanks to Madame Mao, I couldn’t even listen to classical music, never mind rock ’n’ roll. China was in the midst of a campaign against Beethoven, whose chief crime was “composing bourgeois music.” I couldn’t exactly see how Beethoven could rot your mind, but I persuaded myself that China had the right to restrict influences it considered harmful. I contented myself with playing Mozart concertos on my flute in the privacy of my room. But just how private was that? Erica assumed authorities bugged us and opened our mail. I scoffed — until two of my letters were opened. The school had translated them and passed them around for everyone to read. Fu the Enforcer thought this perfectly normal.

One day I stumbled upon a secret library Inside an old campus building, locked in glass cabinets, were some of the most subversive material in China: the
New York Times
, the
International Herald Tribune
, the
New York Review of Books
, the
Guardian
, the
Times
of London,
Atlantic, Time
, and yes, even
Newsweek
. The librarian grudgingly let me in when I explained I wasn’t Chinese, but warned the next time I would need a letter from the Foreign Students Office. As I hungrily scanned a month-old copy of the
NewYork Times
, two Chinese students presented their letter of introduction. As they browsed through a British newspaper, the librarian planted herself next to them and peppered them with questions until they gave up and left.

I raced back to my dorm and excitedly asked Cadre Huang for a letter of introduction. “Concentrate on reading Chinese books,” he advised. I was crushed. He wouldn’t budge. As a sop, he said I could read old issues of
National Geographic
and
Reader’s Digest
hidden away in another locked reading room in the department of Western languages. I couldn’t understand why
Reader’s Digest
was less objectionable than the
NewYork Times
, but anything was better than
China Pictorial
, a monthly that specialized in bumper harvests. I wondered how many of these secret reading rooms existed. Was there one that offered
Glamor
magazine, the
National Enquirer
and
Penthouse?
As a special privilege, Huang also allowed me to borrow banned books from the university library, including Vehlens
Theory of the Leisure Class
and novels by Mailer, Proust, Hemingway, Bellow and Dos Passos.

With little else to do but study Chinese, I made fast progress. By mid-December I was attending history lectures with Scarlet’s class and understanding about half. As a visible minority in Canada, I always assumed I was Chinese. But in China, the more Chinese I learned, the less Chinese I felt. I had expected to find my roots here. Instead I discovered that the harder I tried to be Chinese, the more I realized I wasn’t Chinese at all. On days when the sun shone and Fu the Enforcer didn’t compare me to Erica, linguistically or otherwise, I felt a bit at home. On days when everything seemed to go wrong, I felt like an alien from another planet.

One Sunday morning in January 1973, I watched a speed-skating competition at No Name Lake. Two men stood out in the sea of Mao suits. They were wearing knee-high leather boots, ponchos trimmed with fur and embroidery and exuberant grass green silk bonnets. Intrigued, I walked over to chat. They turned out to be Tibetan students at the nearby National Minorities Institute. To my surprise, they were instantly hostile. Perhaps they were sick of Chinese gawkers. We spoke stiffly for a few moments. I asked how they found life in Beijing. Apparently, they had been patronized once too often. “All of China is the land of Chairman Mao,” snapped one of them. “We’re just fine wherever we go.”

I sympathized. I myself tried so hard to fit in, even learning Chinese body language. To indicate “me,” I learned not to crudely thump my chest the way Westerners did but to delicately point my index finger an inch away from my nose. I adopted the slack-armed shuffle of the local populace. I stopped gesticulating. And I learned never, ever to eat with my fingers. But China was so relentlessly conformist that all lefties were forced from childhood to eat and write with their right hands. My left-handedness attracted instant crowds. “Look, she’s writing with her left hand! Maybe she’s retarded?” or “Look, she’s eating with her left hand! How weird!”

A couple of times, I inadvertently violated the strict Cultural Revolution dress code. Back then, it was okay to wear a blouse in summer, but exposing your sweater to public view in winter was the Chinese equivalent of being topless. “Everyone laughed at you. It looked so ugly,” Scarlet said, reprimanding me for going out without a jacket over my sweater. When Beijing’s tiger heat set in, I couldn’t bear wearing long pants, but skirts, dresses and shorts were unheard of in the early 1970s. I bought some fabric and ordered several pairs of baggy shorts at a local tailor shop at a cost of about ten cents each. The staff looked doubtful until I assured them I was a foreigner. Only after I bicycled around wearing them did I realize my mistake. Beijing truck drivers honked their horns, leaned out their windows and yelled, “Thighs!” I also stumbled when it came to footwear. All Chinese women wore standard plastic sandals, but my feet were much too wide to squeeze into them.
So I wore plastic flip-flops to class. Fu the Enforcer denounced me for being disrespectful. Apparently flip-flops were another sign of near-nudity.

So why did I want to stay for a whole year? China was like a never-ending Outward Bound course; I knew I would never forgive myself for quitting. I also took to heart all the Maoist tenets about improving myself as a human being. I really believed that if I worked hard and reformed my “world outlook,” one day I would be worthy of joining the Chinese revolution. I dismissed the culture shock as character-building. The deprivation seemed minor compared to the chance to watch history in the making. Erica and I had committed ourselves to stay until the following summer. After some agonized debate — we really missed rock ’n’ roll but we also desperately needed remolding — we even applied for an extension into second year, until the summer of 1974.

As the only two Westerners studying in China, we felt a heavy responsibility not only to live up to the rigors of physical labor but to spread the word about the revolution. We sent carefully worded letters to the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post
and the Toronto
Globe and Mail
offering to write articles about our student life at Beijing University. The
Los Angeles Times
wrote back immediately and assured us any article would be published without distortion. The reply from a
New York Times
editor came shortly after. “We are primarily concerned with accuracy, with absolutely no bias and with complete freedom from official censorship. Without knowing more about you, and without being able to check further into your credentials, I see no way to proceed.” We felt insulted, even though our intent was propagandistic. When the
Post
and the
Globe
failed to respond, we lost interest. We never did submit an article to the
Los Angeles Times
. My career as Beijing Jan was getting off to a slow start.

We were most homesick during Western holidays. At Halloween, Erica picked out the seeds from a sunflower to create a passing resemblance to a grinning jack-o’-lantern. At Christmas, the Canadian Embassy invited me for roast turkey and cranberry sauce. On December 25, Erica and I couldn’t resist humming a few carols
at recess while playing ping-pong. At noon, I went for a stroll to Haidian, the town beside the campus. If I closed my eyes, I could almost believe the tinkling bicycle bells were sleigh bells. The next day was Mao’s seventy-ninth birthday. I was surprised that despite a massive personality cult, it wasn’t a public holiday and went unacknowledged even in the
People’s Daily
. I later learned that Mao, at one point before the Cultural Revolution, had given a specific directive not to celebrate his birthday or name anything after him. That was why there were no Mao Zedong avenues or squares or parks or ships.

Erica and I weren’t the only Westerners in China. There were a few foreign correspondents, a small diplomatic community and a handful of “foreign experts” working as teachers and propaganda text polishers. When I split from my tour group in August, I didn’t know a soul in Beijing. Out of sheer pity, the Americans left me the phone number of a former classmate of theirs who was working at the Swedish Embassy as a cultural attaché.

While I waited to begin classes at Beijing University, Anders Hansson took me on bicycle tours of the city. In those xenophobic days, people gaped at us as we pedaled by. Anders, who was twenty-eight, worried that the authorities might be upset. I was unconcerned. After all, neither of us was Chinese. Later, after I started at Beijing University, I occasionally dropped by his apartment, sometimes with Erica, for some Camembert and forbidden Beethoven.

But our visits did not go unnoticed. Once, after Anders dropped Erica off in Tiananmen Square, a PLA sentry accosted her.

“Who were those people?” he demanded.

“Friends,” said Erica.

“Which embassy?” he barked. She told him.

“How do you know them?”

“My friend’s friend,” said Erica stubbornly.

“Who’s your friend?”

“A foreign student.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m also a foreign student.”

“Oh,” he said, not quite believing her. “From which country?” “America.”

In those days, no Chinese would have dared lie about being an American. The soldier looked embarrassed, and apologized.

Such encounters were common. Erica and I often were treated rudely until people realized we weren’t Chinese. Neither of us found this pleasant, but at first we accepted it without complaint. Didn’t China have a right to be careful? Hadn’t Mao warned that there were many spies trying to undermine the regime?

One day Anders invited us to tag along while he applied for a visa at the Soviet Embassy. There wasn’t much entertainment in those days, and Erica and I were curious to see the mission, reputedly the biggest in Beijing. As we drove through the ornate wrought-iron gates, the Chinese sentries stared at us in astonishment. No Chinese ever came here, the enemy’s lair. I knew vaguely about the Sino-Soviet split. I knew that Moscow had recalled its technical experts working on Chinese development projects. I also knew that Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution to purge “China’s Khrushchev,” the insulting codename for President Liu Shaoqi. But how could anyone keep a straight face with Chinese slogans like “Down with the new czars!” and “Boil Brezhnev in oil!” And after all, weren’t China and Russia both Communist?

While Anders went inside, Erica and I scampered delightedly around the manicured grounds. Neither of us had seen grass since we had left North America. Mao, believing grass harbored mosquitoes, had mobilized Chinese schoolchildren to uproot every shoot. In Beijing, trees grew out of plain dirt patches. Even the parks were just expanses of dusty earth, punctuated with a few bushes. Back at the university, we gaily recounted our escapade to Erica’s roommate. She looked upset, but said nothing.

I was developing a crush on Anders and the feeling was mutual, but we were both too shy to do anything about it beyond going for bike rides. About a week after our visit to the Soviet Embassy, I decided to invite him onto the campus. Beijing University was off-limits to most foreigners, so I asked Fu the Enforcer for permission. She was startled, but stammered that she had no objection. When I innocently asked if she wanted to meet him, she blushed. I had no idea that in China an introduction like that was the penultimate step to nuptials. A few days later, Fu abruptly informed me that any
visit from a foreigner first had to be cleared through the protocol department of the Foreign Ministry.

Fu decided enough was enough. She complained to Erica, “No one knows what kind of person he is.” Erica, who had a much better grasp of the nuances of Chinese culture than I did, understood at once that she was expected to act as intermediary. She took me aside. “All diplomats here are considered spies,” she said. “Just seeing one casts suspicion on us.” I was ambivalent. I knew the Chinese were paranoid. I had deliberately avoided the Canadian Embassy. But though complete immersion was good for my Chinese, I felt I’d go crazy if I didn’t have the occasional chance to talk to another Westerner. I postponed a decision. I knew that Anders had just left on the Trans-Siberian for a six-week holiday in Sweden.