Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (12 page)

That Saturday night, the chancellor of Beijing University, Erica’s father’s old roommate from Cal. Tech., summoned her to his house. Two hours later, she came back to the dormitory with a long face. We were both in the doghouse, but mainly, I was. College students back home were getting into trouble for smoking grass. We were in trouble for walking on it.

“I hear you two went to the Soviet Embassy,” Zhou Peiyuan had said to her angrily. “The Soviets could have taken you in and reported that you were seeking political asylum. Since you are not Chinese citizens, China could not have done anything about it. Bright Precious Wong at least could have been rescued by the Canadian Embassy,” he said, using my Chinese name. “But not in your case. There is no American embassy here. The Soviets have no scruples in matters like these.”

Erica listened contritely. Chancellor Zhou (pronounced
Joe
) then took up the matter of Anders. Why, he wanted to know, had he taken us to the Soviet Embassy? “What were his motives? What was he trying to accomplish?” he demanded. Erica explained that Anders needed a Soviet visa. Chancellor Zhou thought that was clear evidence he was a spy.

“Why does he want to come to Beijing University?” he asked, alluding to my invitation to show him around the campus. Chancellor Zhou noted grimly that many diplomats were anxious to find out anything they could about China. Some even rummaged
through garbage dumps hoping to find a scrap of a
neibu
, or “internal” newspaper, which foreigners weren’t allowed to read.

“Is Hansson nice and considerate?” he asked. Erica said he was. Chancellor Zhou took this to be highly suspicious, too. “Why can’t he find someone else? There are plenty of Swedish girls in Sweden. And why can’t she find some Chinese friends? There are many nice Chinese here.”

Zhou was adamant. “Are they in love?” he demanded. Erica, in whom I confided everything, responded with a resounding no, bless her soul. He ignored her. “If they are in love, then Bright Precious Wong should go back to Canada and marry him there. Otherwise, she should break it off completely. Just tell him she’s busy if he calls.”

Chancellor Zhou said authorities were worried about Anders’s influence on me. “The Communist Party and Premier Zhou Enlai are deeply concerned about the foreign students at Beijing University,” he said. As Erica told me this, I could picture the cadres sitting around in their shabby Mao suits discussing my non-existent love life. “We want you to come in contact only with correct ideologies,” he finished.

So there it was. Erica and I were guinea pigs in a Chinese experiment to dump friends and influence people. Anders’s Camembert was ruining their grand plan. Erica faithfully reported all this to me, and it set my head reeling. I remembered Chen, the Chinese mechanic. It hadn’t been an aberration. The Communist Party was telling me who could be my friends. I had found my roots.

I knew everyone would be relieved if I stopped seeing Anders. After mulling it over for several weeks, I convinced myself that was the only course. It was what any Chinese would do, and I was trying to be Chinese. The question was how to break it off. I went to see Chancellor Zhou, an urbane, silver-haired physicist who spoke excellent English. He ushered me into his comfortable living room, where we sat side by side in tan slip-covered chairs.

“Let’s have a frank discussion,” he said, beaming at me in a grand-fatherly way through his rimless spectacles. I took him at his word.

“I feel partly Western,” I began, with dumb Canadian candor. “It’s hard to explain to you, but I find China a bit strange. When I can
be with someone like myself, I feel like I’ve had a break, a holiday.” It wasn’t very tactful to tell someone you needed a holiday from his country, but that was how I felt. Immersion in any language is hard, but immersion in Cultural Revolution China was very hard. Chancellor Zhou noted that I already had a friend in Erica. That was true, I thought to myself. I couldn’t have survived without her. But I didn’t realize that in China friends were rationed.

“Why can’t I have two friends?” I asked. I didn’t seem to be getting through. Chancellor Zhou was seventy years old. He had a hearing aid, which he turned down when he began speaking and didn’t turn up again unless he felt like listening. In his view, we were there to discuss not whether I could have a foreign friend but how to break off the friendship. To my astonishment, he suggested we role play. “Suppose I’m your young Swedish friend, and I call. ‘Hello?’ Now you say: ‘Please call the Foreign Ministry.’ It’s easy. That’s all you have to say.”

I had already resolved to stop seeing Anders, but I had no intention of doing the deed over Beijing’s scratchy telephone system. It was bad enough to dump a friend at someone else’s behest. At least I would do it my way. Poor Chancellor Zhou. He had survived Red Guard interrogations, but he wasn’t used to rebellious North Americans. By 11 p.m., we had been talking for three hours and it was way past his bedtime. “You’re dogmatic!” he cried in exasperation, calling me the worst thing he could think of. I felt like retorting that he wasn’t exactly Mr. Flexible, but I bit my lip. I finally left, with him urging me to talk things over with my classmates and Erica.

Anders called a few days after he returned from Sweden. Because he was not allowed on campus, I met him by the road. He told me his father had died of a heart attack a week and a half after he arrived in Stockholm. I didn’t know what to say. At his apartment, when I broke the news that I was forbidden to see him again, he said sadly that he found it difficult to live in China. We sat there silently, feeling sorry for ourselves. Then he drove me back. We had never even held hands, let alone kissed.

I kept my word and stopped seeing him. Chancellor Zhou soon forgave me for being dogmatic and invited Erica and me to New
Years dinner at his home. To my surprise, a maid cooked and served the holiday meal; no one else I knew had help. We sat at a round table and stuffed ourselves with food the masses could only dream of eating: sausages, meatballs with gravy, a whole chicken boiled for soup, crunchy hothouse green beans, sweet garlic pork, tender bamboo shoots, chunks of pork stewed with fresh chestnuts, creamed hothouse cauliflower and thousand-year-old duck eggs. “Eat, eat,” his wife urged everyone. Their grandson, who was eight, lit some firecrackers to usher in the New Year. Chancellor Zhou, who was dressed in an expensively tailored dark wool Mao suit, gave me a photo album and Erica a red chiffon scarf. As his wife served cream pastries and a huge cake, he stood up. “To everyone’s health,” he said, raising his thimble-sized glass of sweet clove wine. Erica and I stood up, too, and raised our glasses. “Happy New Year,” he added.

“Happy New Year,” I echoed, taking a sip.

In February 1973, just before the Spring Festival holiday, Anders happened to drop by the apartment of a newly arrived British teacher I was visiting. Happy to see him, I chatted with him for half an hour. I foolishly thought the chance encounter didn’t matter. But we were all under surveillance. On the first day of classes after the holidays, Fu the Enforcer and Cadre Huang came into my classroom. They weren’t smiling.

“Your studies at Beijing University are over,” Cadre Huang said. “The leaders from the Foreign Ministry called us on Saturday. You have to exit the border by February 28.”

I was stunned. Why? I asked. Cadre Huang didn’t change his expression. “Your father went to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and requested that you stay only this long,” he said. Fu the Enforcer nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Your father requested this.”

In fact, my mother had just written saying she and my father approved of my staying on another year. She also said she planned to visit me that May. Could they have changed their minds in less than a week? When I told Cadre Huang about the letter, he giggled without smiling and changed tactics. “You yourself requested to stay only six months when you first came in August.” That wasn’t true. Both Erica and I had asked to stay a year – at least until the
summer. What would I have done with myself in Montreal in the middle of the academic year? But Cadre Huang was adamant.

In shock, I started drawing up travel plans. It was February 12. I had sixteen days to leave the country. I decided to take the train down the coast via Nanking and Shanghai, and then on to Canton and Hong Kong, a journey that would take at least a week. That afternoon, Fu went downtown with me to help me close my bank account and send a telegram to my parents to warn them I would soon be home. On the bus, a man hunched in the seat in front of me ground his teeth and laughed eerily to himself. Dressed in a grimy blue Mao suit, he alternately frowned and grinned. I couldn’t make out what he was muttering, but whenever we passed a huge red and white billboard emblazoned with Mao’s quotations, he would read it aloud and cackle. Fu ignored him, but I felt a spark of solidarity with him.

By evening, the word had spread. My classmates dropped by as I began packing. I searched their faces for some sign that I wasn’t crazy. Didn’t they realize that school authorities were lying? But no. They closed ranks. Everyone was as friendly and warm as before. No one disputed the official version.

The next morning, Fu brought a plate of homemade dumplings to cheer me up. I just felt worse. Suddenly Cadre Huang came bounding up the stairs to say my parents were calling on the office phone.

“We got your telegram,” my mother shouted. The line was so bad I could barely make out what she was saying. “What happened? Did you do something wrong?”

“I don’t know!” I bellowed back.

“What?”

“I DON’T KNOW!” I screamed.

“Professor Paul Lin is here with us. He wants to speak to you.” Professor Lin was the head of McGill’s Asian studies center. He was a Chinese-Canadian who had worked for China’s Central Broadcasting Administration in the 1950s and who maintained close ties with the Beijing government throughout the Cultural Revolution. In Canada, he was considered to have the best contacts with China.

“Hello, Jan,” said Professor Lin calmly. “Perhaps you should see Chancellor Zhou.”

My father got on the phone next. “We’re all going to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa tomorrow,” he yelled.

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

“What?” my father said.

“OKAY!” I screeched. “THANKS!”

After the phone call, the news finally hit home: I was being expelled. My mother had made me feel as though I had committed some horrible crime, and perhaps I had. After all, hadn’t I broken my word by failing to bolt as soon as I saw Anders? I felt guilty and ashamed. I gulped, trying to keep my tears back. Everyone in the office was watching me, so I ducked into my private classroom for a brief cry.

That afternoon, Scarlet lay on her bed, wordlessly staring at the ceiling. Fu the Enforcer stopped by. “So sudden, really sudden,” she murmured. The other girls in the dormitory dropped in. Erica could tell that I was on the verge of tears again. “Do you want to be alone?” she whispered. “Go to my room.” I ran into her room and cried. Erica was my only link to sanity. No, I was not crazy, she assured me. Of course I was supposed to study at Beijing University until the summer. She reminded me that we both had even applied for an extension for a second year and we were still awaiting an answer.

So this was thought control, I realized. I had arrived believing everything the Chinese told me. Even after I began to have doubts, I still believed most of what they told me. What didn’t make sense, I blamed on my own lack of understanding and my bourgeois world outlook. Now I understood that you not only weren’t free to do what you wanted but you weren’t free to
think
what you wanted, either. The Communist Party said black was white and white was black, and everyone agreed with alacrity. There was not a single murmur of dissent. It was the beginning of my real awakening, a long, painful process that would take many years more. I was not falling out of love with China, but I was beginning to understand it better.

On February 15, the Municipal Revolutionary Committee summoned
bewildered Canadian diplomats to a meeting and informed them I was leaving the country. One of the diplomats told Anders.

At Beijing University, the Foreign Students Office held a farewell criticism/self-criticism session for me, a Cultural Revolution ritual. “Dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly,” Mao had said, reminding me of my mother. “Our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades’ minds and our Party’s work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing … To fear neither criticism nor self-criticism … is the only effective way to prevent all kinds of political dust and germs from contaminating the minds of our comrades and the body of our Party.”

To me, criticism sessions, like a visit to a therapist in the West, seemed a good way to take stock of one’s life. As Cadre Huang and my teachers settled into chairs, I knew I was supposed to speak first and that self-flagellation was
de rigueur
. “I didn’t make the best use of my time,” I said humbly. “I read too many English books instead of concentrating on Chinese. And I didn’t speak Chinese with my classmates enough.” I wanted to add that Fu the Enforcer’s teaching methods were pigheaded, but clearly something had worked: I was fluent after just six months. “Teacher Fu showed great concern about my welfare, whether I ate well, dressed properly and rested enough.” She beamed and nodded.

Then I took a deep breath. “I came to China for two reasons,” I said. “I wanted to learn Chinese. But I also wanted to transform my ideological outlook. I regret that I didn’t have time to do manual labor in a factory. The decision that I leave is very sudden. It is obvious that my teachers have not been consulted. That is commandism. It is against the mass line, against Chairman Mao’s practice of always consulting the masses.” Today, I can’t believe I actually said that, but there it is, in my journal. That was how everyone talked back then, and you have to remember that I learned Chinese by reading Stalin.

My teachers giggled uncomfortably. Cadre Huang cleared his throat, shielding his unshaven jaw with a bony hand. He completely ignored what I had just said. “You are earnest, hard-working and you generally complete your homework on time,” he said. “Of course, you are not as diligent as the Vietnamese students we had before the Cultural Revolution. But your attitude is good. Your goal
in life is not to make money. You want to go back to Canada and further the understanding of China in that country. Although you have been deeply influenced by the bourgeoisie, your attitude is one of wanting to change. You are enthusiastic about manual labor and studying Chairman Mao’s writings. But you should read Marx and Lenin more. You shouldn’t read so many English books.”