Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (3 page)

In high school, as a straight arrow, I was voted head prefect and elected to the student council. In college, I was thrilled to be selected as a “freshette princess” — along with four blondes. But after the experience of being interviewed about my “favorite flower” and my “favorite color” I quickly embraced feminism. At seventeen, I tossed out my
Seventeen
magazines and had a rubber stamp made that said, “This Exploits Women.” Heart pounding, I would stand at the back of city buses and brand offending pantyhose ads before getting off. It was the perfect warm-up for making friends with Mao’s youthful storm troopers, known as the Red Guards.

From feminism, it was a natural step to Maoism. I believed women were oppressed. Workers were oppressed. Teenagers were oppressed. I thought, to quote Mao, that “all reactionaries are paper tigers.” I thought peace and love would solve all the world’s evils, including pantyhose. I thought candles were better than electricity, and that if only I made my own candles, the world would be a better place. I thought I could hitchhike anywhere and nothing would happen to me – until the first time I did and a very friendly man offered me $5 for a blowjob.

I went to Beijing partly to search for my roots. My Canadian-born parents always told me I was Chinese, and certainly, the mirror did not lie. They emphasized that I had to be extra good, extra smart, extra nice, because whatever I did reflected on my race. My grandparents had paid the head tax and my parents had lived through the humiliation of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese from Canada. At age four, my father had to register with the Department of Immigration and Colonization. At the bottom of the form, which we have kept to this day, it says: “This certificate does not establish legal status in Canada.” When my uncle was a little boy in Victoria, British Columbia, people pelted him
with lumps of coal and taunted, “Ching chong Chinaman, washee my pants.”

The nursing school in London, Ontario, where my mother was the first Chinese-Canadian graduate, rejected an earlier applicant with this remark: “A sick person doesn’t want to look up and see a yellow face.” Ottawa stripped my aunt, the third Chinese-Canadian woman in Canada to earn a medical degree, of her citizenship in the 1940s when she married a Chinese. She discovered the loss three decades later when she applied for a passport to go on a vacation to Spain. When the government restored her passport, it gave her a pamphlet entitled
How To Be A Good Canadian
.

The lingering effects of the Exclusion Act, which was repealed in 1947, froze the size of the Chinese community in Canada. When I was born five years later, in 1952, Montreal had only about a thousand Chinese, about the same as in 1915. But already I was growing up in a different Canada. Attitudes had changed so dramatically that, in the 1950s, discrimination was something that upset francophone Quebeckers, not someone like me. In the 1970s, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s multi-culturalism, I became proud of my ethnic heritage. Not that anyone would let me forget. Where are you
really
from? other Canadians wanted to know. They meant well, but weren’t satisfied until I caved in and uttered the magic word: China.

Their curiosity about my ancestry made me feel ashamed that I couldn’t speak Chinese and knew so little about China. I began to read everything I could about the People’s Republic. To my delight, it seemed to be one of the few places in the world doing something right. Led by a charismatic genius named Mao Zedong, the Chinese were building a better world, or so I thought. The chosen few allowed inside reinforced my view of utopia. Writers as diverse as Eurasian novelist Han Suyin (
Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
) and American journalist Edgar Snow (
Red Star Over China
) reported that the Chinese were happy as clams. When President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the hardened, cynical U.S. press corps accompanying him went ga-ga. If you threw out a razor blade, the reports went, it would be returned to you at a later stop.

In the more cynical nineties, it’s hard to believe China had
established such a glowing image abroad. After all, Beijing made no secret of being a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But back then, only a beleaguered minority talked about human rights, dissent and megalomania. The 1957 Hundred Flowers Movement, in which Mao enticed intellectuals to speak their minds, then shipped them off to labor camps as rightists, wasn’t understood until later. The economic disaster of the 1958 Great Leap Forward, which sparked one of the worst man-made famines in Chinese history, was blamed on bad weather and the Soviet pull-out of aid. Mao used the Cultural Revolution to purge his enemies within the Communist Party, but many China-watchers portrayed it as his brilliant strategy to prevent the emergence of a new class of party bureaucrats. Who could argue with that?

For some reason, the Chinese were the good guys of communism. The Russians were the bad guys. They had gulags and a menacing secret police called the KGB. The Chinese had pandas and an army in sneakers. Mao was cute, a cultural icon, like Marilyn Monroe. Andy Warhol had never made a silkscreen of Brezhnev. And if there were excesses, well, Mao had a quote to deal with that, too. “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

The West’s own cultural revolution of the 1960s predisposed a whole generation to being sympathizers. To conform in the late sixties and early seventies was to be anti—establishment, anti—Vietnam War, anti—antediluvian – and pro—China. I didn’t trust anyone over thirty, and couldn’t imagine ever being that old one day myself. I didn’t shave my legs or my armpits. I read Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver and Betty Friedan. I absorbed Sartre and de Beauvoir, and
enjoyed
being alienated. I parted my flowing hair down the middle, tie-dyed T-shirts, took pottery lessons and listened to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

But unlike my peers, I never got into drugs or alcohol. Maoism was all I ever needed to get high, although in hindsight it’s questionable which would have inflicted more brain damage. In the
1960s and 1970s, I thought I was a hard-nosed revolutionary, but I was really a Montreal Maoist. I never joined any radical group, let alone considered setting off bombs. At one university sit-in, I quickly lost my nerve when helmeted riot police arrived to clear us from the chancellors office. I gave one leather-jacketed cop a tentative punch in the shoulder, but backed down immediately when he whirled around to arrest me. “Excuse me, how do I get out of here?” I asked, all law-abiding Asian sweetness. He allowed me to leave unscathed.

As part of their relentless insistence that I was Chinese, my parents somehow managed to instill the Confucian work ethic in me. As a third grader I lay awake worrying about how I would ever earn a living. Unlike the stereotypical Asian, I was terrible at arithmetic. But I won spelling bees and enjoyed gossip, so journalism seemed the natural job for me. My role model came straight out of Superman comics. Who cared about the Man of Steel? I wanted to be Lois Lane.

As I grew older and idealistic, I didn’t have to modify my grade-three dream. A journalist seemed the perfect do-gooder job. A reporter could help change the world, someone once said, by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Even when I took a left turn, it was easy to stay on the same career track. Just the way Jane Fonda became Hanoi Jane during the Vietnam War, I could be Beijing Jan, aiding China’s cause. As a misguided Maoist, I saw nothing wrong with propaganda. Telling people only the positive side of China was morally justified. Shouldn’t everyone support a nation that was trying to improve the world?

If I was ever to become a correspondent in Beijing, I figured I’d better learn the language and study the history. In 1971, I enrolled in Asian studies at McGill University and was immediately plunged into an academic world that mirrored the cold war. Pro-China professors taught me that Mao was creating a New Man. Anti-China sinologists were derided as U.S. government stooges. There was no middle ground in studying the Middle Kingdom.

I longed to see the country for myself. That summer, an Australian classmate and I applied at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa for tourist visas. After a month of suspense, the word came
back. She couldn’t go – she was white – but I could because I was an “Overseas Chinese.” It seemed odd to me that we should be separated into categories, and I was apprehensive about a solo journey, but I wouldn’t dream of turning down the chance. That was why I was having last-minute jitters about being all alone in utopia.

Silly me. By 1972, there were already 800 million Chinese.

The 7 a.m. train from Hong Kong deposited me across from a sleepy border town called Shenzhen. As I walked over a small footbridge, wearing my new mainland Chinese outfit, I heard the strains of revolutionary opera blasting over the loudspeakers. Above my head the Chinese flag, red with five yellow stars, fluttered in the hot breeze. A handsome young People’s Liberation Army sentry stood at attention. I stared at him in awe and thought to myself, “My first Communist.” Another PLA border guard checked my passport and politely waved me through. I was in! It was June 1, 1972, exactly one hundred days after President Nixon had arrived in China.

After a glass of hot jasmine tea in a waiting room, I boarded another train for Canton, where a young woman my age met me at the station. With her round pink cheeks and glossy braids that she tossed briskly over her shoulders, my guide, Bai, looked as though she had popped right out of a propaganda poster. Genetics dictated that I stay at the Canton Overseas Chinese Hotel. The Stalinist-style sandstone building teemed with compatriots from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia who lounged around the lobby in flowered polyester pantsuits and solid-gold jewelry, picking their teeth and shouting to one another in village dialects.

I liked the lobby decor. In 1972, China was smack in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Student Red Guards, who specialized in ransacking temples and burning books, had slathered the lobby walls with red paint and emblazoned the Chairman’s quotations everywhere. My tiny room continued the class-struggle motif. The interior designer had chosen the prison-cell look — whitewashed walls, quite a few mice and no windows. Someone had brilliantly solved the ventilation problem by cutting a circle the size of a bicycle wheel high in the wall separating me from the next room. At night, I listened to the shouts, and later the snores, of the family next
door as I wrote in my diary. So few people had the chance to visit China in 1972 that I felt obliged to record everything I saw.

Had I been deemed a genuine foreigner, I would have been charged twice as much for a room in the East Wind Guest House, which offered luxuries like interpreters and rooms with windows. At the Overseas Chinese Hotel, service was exclusively in Chinese. I closed my eyes and let my finger land at random on the Chinese menu. The hotel waiters assumed I was a deaf mute who liked poached innards.

Guide Bai, who spoke almost no English, rarely accompanied me anywhere. Each morning, she stood on the steps of the hotel to ensure I got into the right car. One day, she told the driver to take me to the Canton Trade Fair. To my disappointment, it looked like a clearance sale at an army and navy surplus store. I couldn’t understand why the crowds passionately jostled and shoved for a glimpse of a clunky refrigerator or a pair of leather shoes. I didn’t know these were the best goods China produced, and that even if they had the money, the window-shoppers couldn’t buy anything. Everything on display was exported for hard currency.

With my visa good for three months, I didn’t want to waste a moment. I explored the streets, wandered into shops and peered into people’s courtyards. Everyone seemed tanned and fit compared with the scrawny, pasty-faced Chinese I had seen in Hong Kong. Male and female alike wore identical loose white shirts and navy blue or gray or tan pants. No one wore any jewelry, not even a wedding ring. To my idealistic eyes, they looked beautiful. The women used no makeup and wore their hair in braids or in simple blunt cuts. I had nothing to stamp “This Exploits Women.”

The only billboards had either Mao quotations – huge white characters on a glossy fire-engine-red background – or else propaganda paintings of happy workers, peasants and soldiers. Busts of Mao, usually in pure white, decorated office lobbies and meeting rooms. Outdoors, towering Mao statues, portraying him with his right arm outstretched to acknowledge homage from the masses, dominated university campuses and city parks. In contrast to the neon lights of Hong Kong, store windows here displayed only red flags and Mao’s works. If this was the Cultural Revolution, I
approved. It didn’t occur to me how annoying it must have been to live in a place where you couldn’t buy Scotch tape or take-out Chinese food.

My professors had told me the Cultural Revolution was also Mao’s attack on feudalism. I thought that it was all about getting rid of superstitions, trashing musty operas and eliminating bad habits like selfishness, dishonesty and shopping. I had no idea that so many people were being hounded to their deaths. I took everything at face value, and when it didn’t add up, I still didn’t get it because virtually everyone I met enthused about the Cultural Revolution. In 1966 when it first began, most Chinese were genuine believers. By 1972, many had stopped believing, but only a very few were unwise enough to share their thoughts with a loose cannon like me. Having grown up in Canada, I had no idea an entire nation could be cowed for years into saying what few believed any more.

When the rare person tried to set me straight, I tried to set
them
straight. At the Canton Zoo one afternoon, I struck up a conversation of sorts with a slim twenty-two-year-old worker with high cheekbones and finely shaped eyes. His name was Chen. We talked mostly in sign language. When he fingered his worn denim work jacket, he meant he was a worker. But what kind? He went through the motions of driving a car, then fixing an imaginary engine. An auto mechanic! He must be happy, right? I smiled broadly, pointed at my grinning mouth, then at him. He shook his head, and turned down his mouth in a Chaplinesque expression of sadness. He thrust out his hands and made me feel the calluses. Then he rubbed his fingers together and shook his head. He meant the pay was meager.