Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (28 page)

“What’s this?” he said.

“Ganmao shui”
Karen said.

“Chinese herbal cold medicine,” Norman translated.

That did it. The customs official had had enough. Here was an American who looked like a
Seventeen
magazine cover girl, pretending she couldn’t speak English. And a skinny guy with a beard was translating her mumbo jumbo. They were putting him on, he figured. He announced curtly he was taking a vial to the lab for analysis. A few minutes later he returned. Whatever the Chinese put in their cold medicine, it wasn’t heroin, thank God. The customs official held out the vial. The tip had been snipped off.

“You keep it,” said Norman. “It’s really good stuff if you get colds.”

“I don’t get colds,” he said curtly, tossing it in the wastebasket.

Karen got angry. She couldn’t understand why he had destroyed the vial in the first place and was now throwing it away

Norman shushed her up and turned to the customs official. “She’s an American who was born in China. This is her first trip back to the United States. You realize that you’re not giving her a very good impression.”

In China, such a comment would have merely goaded the border inspectors on. National pride would have been at stake. The historic struggle between the proletariat (them) and the bourgeoisie (hapless travelers) would have to have been settled on the spot. The Chinese inspector would have had to find
something
and declare it contraband in order not to lose face. But the American customs official was silent. He stared at Karen for a long moment. He didn’t crack a smile, but he also stopped checking her luggage. Norman and I relaxed. We were back in the West.

P
ARADISE
L
OST

Interviewing a dissident, Gao Xin, in the Altar to the Sun park in Beijing. Imprisoned following the Tiananmen Massacre, he was never sentenced and eventually was released. He left for the United States where he attended Harvard University
.
Photo: Mark Avery

Millionaire Zhao Zhangguang, holding a bottle of Formula 101, which he claims will cure baldness
.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

T
he FBI was on the telephone. “Can I come over and talk to you?” a female asked politely. It was February 5, 1981. I covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Norman. He shrugged. “Sure,” I told her. “Why don’t you come tomorrow morning?” Our many years in China – six for me and fourteen for Norman – naturally aroused suspicions. We assumed that we had been under surveillance since our return. But I no longer viewed police as pigs. In fact, they seemed downright nice after Chinese State Security agents.

FBI Special Agent Barbara Ann Dennis arrived the next morning at our studio apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. She was in her late twenties, attractive and black. She showed us her badge.

“How many black female special agents are there?” I asked.

“Eight on the whole force.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

She laughed. “Yes.”

“Where?”

She laughed again, and didn’t say. She was wearing a navy blue pantsuit. Maybe her gun was strapped to her ankle, just like in the movies. Or perhaps it was inside her roomy handbag where, we assumed, a tape recorder was whirring.

Her questions about China were as naive as mine were about the FBI. She wanted to know our housing conditions. She asked about
China Reconstructs
and the Institute of Computing Technology. Then she asked us to write down our names, birthdates, birthplaces, the schools we had attended and where we had worked, none of which seemed like state secrets. She gave us her phone number and asked us to call if we remembered anything else.

Perhaps it was hard for the FBI to realize that people could successfully recover from the sixties. Jerry Rubin, the former yippie and wild-haired member of the Chicago Seven, became a yuppie Wall Street banker. PJ. O’Rourke, the acid-tongued humorist of the right, was once a member of a “collective” putting out an “underground” newspaper in Baltimore; he ducked the draft with a doctor’s note listing three and a half pages of drugs he had abused. Even Hanoi Jane was peddling exercise videos promising thinner thighs, and would eventually marry media mogul Ted Turner. If I was ever a security risk, I certainly wasn’t one any longer. At any rate, we never heard from Barbara Ann Dennis again.

The previous time I had come back from Beijing, I had run around in Mao suits. This time, I avoided anything to do with mainland China, especially the U.S.—China People’s Friendship Association. I couldn’t stand being among Maoists who reminded me of how dumb I once was. At Columbia, I honed my skills at investigative reporting (“Question authority”) and learned incisive interviewing techniques (“There is no such thing as a dumb question”). In between classes, I went to Broadway plays and the Museum of Natural History and Beethoven concerts on a barge beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I bought bagels at Zabar’s and shopped for coffee mugs at the Pottery Barn – such a pleasure after so many years of culture schlock.

After graduating from Columbia, I got married to Norman again, this time with paper, so we would no longer have to explain “not-yet-married certificates” to immigration officials at the US.-Canada border. For the next seven years, decked out in bowties and dressed-for-success suits, I worked as a business reporter at the Montreal
Gazette
, the
Boston Globe
, the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Globe and Mail
in Toronto. As I covered container
shipping in Montreal and banking in Boston, I followed events in China with mixed feelings. The economy was growing at double-digit rates. Politburo members began riding in Mercedes Benzes. And beauty pageants were making a comeback. In Toronto, I wrote about tycoons and miscreants, and lobbied for the next opening in the
Globe’s
Beijing bureau. A little over a year later, in 1988, I was on my way. Twelve white male
Globe
reporters had gone before me. I was the first woman, the first of Chinese descent and the first to speak the language. I was also the first with a complete Cultural Revolution wardrobe.

I panicked as my plane hit the runway in Beijing. I had airily told my predecessor, James Rusk, not to bother meeting me at the airport. I was, after all, an old China Hand. But as the Canadian Airlines plane landed, I realized I had no idea how to say Sheraton in Chinese. Luckily, Rusk had ignored me and was waiting at the airport.

In the eight years I had been away, Beijing had changed dramatically. Its population had jumped 50 percent to eleven million, including one million “visitors” on any given day, many of them peasants living in shanty huts and searching for work. The smelly horse carts hauling sloshing tanks of human excrement had disappeared. A new six-lane limited-access highway ringed the capital. Bikes still clogged the roads, but now some had speeds and gears and came in reds, purples, blues and yellows. I bought a green Flying Pigeon, which was stolen within a week. This wasn’t the China I remembered.

I was not the same, either. Eight years as a business reporter had turned me into a professional skeptic. The corporations I had covered were scarily close in organization and outlook to the Chinese Communist Party, with their hierarchies of power, propagandistic press releases and penchant for extreme secrecy. Just like China, they were dominated by an omnipotent chairman, complete with personality cult and sycophantic aides.

The Great Wall Sheraton, where Rusk had reserved me a room, was Beijing’s newest luxury hotel. My cramped single cost $140 a night, up from the $2 a night the Overseas Chinese Hotel had
charged me sixteen years earlier for my windowless cell. The Sheraton had high-speed elevators, liveried doormen and gift shops that didn’t sell Mao’s
Little Red Book
. At breakfast, I had orange juice, croissants with Australian butter and Swiss jam, bacon with scrambled eggs, and real coffee.

Norman was still in Toronto and wouldn’t join me until the end of the year, so I explored the city alone. Having once sweated to grow eggplants and peanuts, I was happy to see food was plentiful. Besides an abundance of watermelons, once so scarce you required a doctor’s note to buy one, street stalls sold strawberries, pineapples, sweet melons, cherries, purple grapes, peaches, plums, apricots, tangerines, broccoli, oyster mushrooms, golden thread mushrooms, white button mushrooms, fresh shiitake mushrooms, bitter melon gourds, green onions, carrots, yams, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuces, peppers, beans, snow peas, celery and slender green asparagus. There were crabs, shrimp, carp, eels, chickens, ducks, pheasants, geese, partridges, eggs, bean curd and all kinds of pork, lamb and beef for sale. The only thing that had disappeared were the lineups.

The government had bulldozed entire neighborhoods of picturesque courtyard homes to build hundreds of featureless eighteen-story apartment buildings in hospital green, dead tan or gray. Some foreigners thought that was cultural genocide, but many Beijingers preferred the highrises, which had central heating, plumbing and piped-in cooking gas, amenities lacking in the traditional homes. The highrises also had automatic elevators, which seemed a metaphor for modernization, Chinese-style. You could have technology, but forget about freedom. Ordinary people weren’t trusted to operate the elevators. Instead, special staff, sitting in chairs, stabbed the buttons, using rubber-tipped chopsticks so they wouldn’t have to over-exert themselves. The operators also moved in desks, telephones, tea thermoses, knitting, stacks of newspapers and, in summer, electric fans or, in winter, space heaters, not to mention their lunch. When they went to the toilet or on a break, the operators would lock the elevator and hang up a sign: Back Soon.

Although most buildings had several elevators, I rarely saw more than one in use at a time. The Chinese believed that elevators needed regular rest periods and that complete rest was the best. Typically,
the operator locked the elevator for an hour at a time, about four times a day, and too bad if your aunt forgot the schedule and came visiting at the wrong time, or you were out shopping and didn’t make it back in time. Most elevators shut down for the night at ten-thirty. At the theater, it was not uncommon to see people bolt before the final curtain to catch the last elevator home. A man who suffered a late-night heart attack had to wait until six in the morning, when the elevators reopened, to go to the hospital because his wife couldn’t carry him down seventeen flights of stairs.

In Mao’s day, bikes so outnumbered cars that at night motorists were required to drive with their headlights off to avoid blinding cyclists. Now, the number of cars was growing so fast that most drivers were rank beginners. Imagine having to live and work and go for a relaxing Sunday outing in one gigantic, never-ending Chinese driving school. (As for the six million manic cyclists in Beijing, their motto seemed to be: Better dead than red.) The
Globe’s
old Toyota was a manual shift. Unfortunately, I only knew how to drive an automatic. At first, I stalled every time I stopped, so until I got the hang of it, my technique was to slow down for red lights, without actually stopping. The other drivers used their horns, not their brakes. And it seemed that no one had told them it wasn’t safe to change four lanes at a time. Nor had anyone warned families not to let their one and only child learn to walk on the expressway.