Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (16 page)

Chen Kaige, whose evocative
Farewell My Concubine
won the 1993 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, also betrayed his father, a successful movie director. At a mass rally during the Cultural Revolution, Chen denounced his father and shoved him around, then stood by as his Red Guard classmates ransacked the family home and burned their books. Chen’s three-hour epic, about the tragic fate of three actors during the Cultural Revolution, was partly intended as a tribute – and an apology – to his father.

Luckily for
my
father, he was safe in Montreal, because Yin wasn’t the only person I betrayed. During my last week at Beijing University, a woman named Liu Yimei showed up at my dormitory.
Granny, our normally pleasant housekeeper-guard, brought her to my room, then walked out, slamming the door behind her. Liu giggled nervously. Her eyes darted around my room, taking in the precious armoire, the bookcase, the desks. She was short and thin, with old-fashioned rimless glasses and hair prematurely streaked with gray. She explained that her husband, Zhao Lihai, a law professor at Beijing University, was a friend of my McGill professor Paul Lin. She insisted I dine out with her family that night.

They took me to the Moscow Restaurant, which had real tablecloths, thirty-foot-high ceilings and a Western menu that offered borscht, bread and jam and Chicken Kiev. Their shy fifteen-year-old daughter never said a word and could scarcely bring herself to look at me all evening. Professor Zhao seemed neurotically insecure, and reminded me of a Chinese Woody Allen. He ordered shrimp and duck, the two most expensive dishes. When the waiter brought the food, Zhao clucked his tongue and apologized for the poor quality. I bristled; it was far better than most ordinary people ever ate.

During dinner, he and his wife kept their voices pitched at a conspiratorial whisper. They both talked a steady stream of counterrevolutionary thoughts. Nothing in China was as good as in the West; the education system was in a shambles; people didn’t have enough to eat or wear. I was shocked and disgusted. In an entire year of living in China, they were the first people I met who disagreed with almost everything the government was doing.

“Why on earth does the Foreign Students Office make you take part in physical labor?” Professor Zhao asked sympathetically.

“I want to,” I replied stiffly.

“What does your father do?” said his wife, changing the subject. When I told her he owned several restaurants, she uttered a small cry of approval, the first person in China to admire my blood-sucking background. She asked how much money he had. I was deeply offended, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I was an accountant at the Beijing Library,” she said. “But I don’t work now. Because of my health.” She laughed unnaturally. “Why don’t I go to Canada and work in your father’s restaurant as an accountant?”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that a person who lived in paradise would forsake it all to be exploited by a capitalist.

“How long has it been since you worked?” I asked her coldly.

“Since my daughter was born,” she said.

A parasite for fifteen years
, I thought with self-righteous revulsion. Had I had any brains, I would have figured out that she had stopped working around 1957, the time of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, when 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals, were labeled rightists and fired. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have changed my low opinion of her. At that point, I had no inkling that China’s rightists were almost all honorable men and women.

Professor Zhao got to the point. “We want to send our daughter abroad to study. She has zero chance here. Can you help us?” His wife began to beg me to help, flattering me and groveling. So that was why they had spent a month’s wages on dinner. I felt sick. I muttered something non-committal. Back in the dormitory, I told Erica all of my doubts and suspicions. The next morning at class I asked my teacher about the Zhaos.

“They’re evil people,” Fu said instantly. “Zhao Lihai sold secrets to the Guomindang and the Americans. He’s famous for his crime.” She added that he hadn’t dared contact me directly because he was on lifelong parole and had to report all his actions to the Communist Party Committee. So he sent his wife. She had come over many times in the past year, and the Foreign Students Office had always turned her away. No one had ever told me. Now that I was leaving, Fu said, they agreed to let the couple see me once, but only because they knew my professor at McGill. Without another moment’s hesitation, I reported to Fu the Enforcer that Professor Zhao and his wife had asked me to get their daughter out.

Many years later, I learned that Yin Luoyi was hauled before her classmates and denounced for her “traitorous” thoughts. Scarlet, who had introduced Yin to Erica, was asked to make a speech attacking Yin. To her credit, she refused. Yin was expelled from Beijing University and sent in disgrace back to her home in northeast China. I have no idea what happened to her. Nor do I know what befell Professor Zhao and his family. I only hope that eventually they were all able to join the exodus to the West. May God forgive me; I don’t think they ever will.

T
ROUBLE IN
P
ARADISE

Arriving at Big Joy Farm
.
Photo: Jan Wong

My second roommate, Fragrance Zhou, harvesting rice; and Party Secretary Pan making dumplings at Big Joy Farm
.
Photo: Jan Wong

I
left China on August 31, 1973, both sad and relieved. I felt I hadn’t transformed myself enough, but I also had had just about as much thought reform as I could take in a single dose. At Shenzhen, customs officials went through my bag, examining a roll of undeveloped film, a Red Guard armband and my collection of Mao buttons. Scarlet had given me the Little Pioneer scarf she had worn in primary school, and after some consultation with his supervisors, the inspector let me keep it.

After fifteen months in China, I succumbed to severe culture shock in Hong Kong. Waiters assumed I was a mainland refugee because I ate three bowls of rice at a sitting. I, in turn, was shocked by the women in their hip-hugging bellbottoms, the glittering shop windows crammed with gold, jade and diamonds, the gleaming Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes, the displays of pornographic magazines, the obscene abundance of fruit and cakes and meat. The doormen thought I was crazy when I tried to open doors for myself. Maybe I was. I stared at the banks of fresh-cut flowers in the outdoor markets. I had not seen a rose in more than a year.

Back in Montreal, I lived by rules of self-imposed austerity. I still thought I had to toughen myself in case the revolution demanded
I one day settle among China’s peasants. So I lived in the McGill student ghetto, in a $15-a-week garret, made all the more virtuous because it had no bathtub or shower. (I cheated by going to the university pool for a daily shower and swim; the lifeguard, impressed with my dedication, gave me private diving lessons.) I ate mostly rice and chicken — the cheapest meat – consciously limiting my ration to one bird for the entire week. After I invited my sister, Gigi, for dinner one night, she went home and ate supper all over again, complaining that I had fed her just three mouthfuls of meat.

My parents were thrilled I had learned Chinese, but deep down, they thought I was going a little overboard. My father said to me, in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, “People don’t work very hard under the communistic system.” I wouldn’t allow anyone to criticize China. He gave up trying to argue. Gigi, who had visited me in China, told my parents my incredible response when she complained that whites were given better hotel accommodations. “It’s because
we’re
closer, like family,” I had said. “Like when guests visit, we give them the bed, but family can sleep on the floor.”

By this time, I thought I was Chinese. I got myself a Chinese-American boyfriend. I went to Chinese movies and read every book I could about China. I took courses in Chinese history, philosophy and politics. That spring, I ran for president of the McGill Chinese Students Association. I won, even though I campaigned in Mao suits. I looked like Honey, that character in the Doonesbury comic strip. I talked like her, too, except I never called anybody Sir. In that persona, I joined the university lecture circuit, speaking to receptive audiences in Canada and the U.S. I didn’t mention anything negative, certainly not the Pyongyang panty thief, or my confiscated
Newsweeks
, or my near-expulsion for seeing another foreigner. Instead, I spoke glowingly about shoveling pig manure and combating selfishness. I didn’t think it was wrong to present a one-sided picture. I was just trying to muster public support for China, which I still believed was the only place in the world doing anything right. The audiences reinforced my convictions by hanging on every word and rarely asking a critical question.

McGill University gave me full credit for my pneumatic drill work at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. After graduating
in honors history in May 1974, I knew the only place I wanted to be was China. I had caught the bug, and it would take years to get it out of my system, if ever.

Erica and I had indeed been guinea pigs. Formal government exchanges began soon after I left Beijing University. Students arrived from almost every country except the U.S. and the Soviet Union, neither of which had normal relations with China. After graduation, I won a Canadian government scholarship that included airfare, a monthly stipend equal to Chairman Mao’s salary and an annual invitation to the embassy Christmas dinner.

In the fall of 1974, I arrived back in Beijing. This time around I felt smug, and much more revolutionary than the other seven Canadians in my group. I already knew all about class struggle, Chinese roommates and physical labor. By now, I also could pass for a local Chinese without any difficulty. So I avoided the growing foreign student community and took advantage of my passable Chinese to enroll in an undergraduate program in history with ordinary students. By December, I was back in Building Twenty-five, four doors down from where I used to live with Scarlet.

This time, my roommate was a bossy peasant named Zhou Sufen (Fragrance Zhou) who had a severe bob, ruddy cheeks and small dark eyes that smoldered resentfully at anyone who crossed her. Physically tough, she took first place in the women’s long-distance race that fall. Unlike Scarlet, a gentle girl from Beijing, Fragrance rarely smiled, even when posing for photographs. She snapped like a crocodile when people teased her. Fragrance blamed her morose-ness on her strict upbringing. “My mother still has some feudal thinking. When I was young, she never wanted me to go out and play with others,” she said.

At her commune, near the ancient capital of Xian in central China, Fragrance had joined the Communist Party, something that fewer than one percent of peasant girls did. As head of the local Communist Youth League, her job had been to persuade disgruntled urban youth — like Scarlet – to sign on for a lifetime of deprivation and hard work. “Many young people boycotted the Youth League activities,” said Fragrance. “I was supposed to get them to sign pledges. It was hopeless.”