Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (9 page)

Striking a pose at Beijing University
.

L
earning Chinese was tough at the best of times, but the Cultural Revolution had trashed every existing dictionary and language textbook. My teachers wrote my lessons on the fly, the typist churned them out, and I learned them warm off the mimeograph machine. Like every schoolchild, I memorized the three most famous Maoist homilies: Serve the People, The Foolish Old Man Who Moved Mountains and In Memory of Norman Bethune. I soon was reading Stalin in Chinese. Nobody thought this strange. Mao, who was studying English at the same time, used the
Communist Manifesto
as
his
textbook. No wonder he never learned to speak English. I, on the other hand, became fluent in Maoist lingo. Phrases like “Down with imperialists and all their running dogs” rolled off my tongue. But I couldn’t say, “May I please have a tube of Bright and Glorious toothpaste?”

By the time I arrived at Beijing University in August 1972, the worst factional fighting of the Cultural Revolution was over. For the moment, the most radical faction, New Beijing University Commune, dominated the school, and two of its most stalwart members, Fu Min and Dai Guifu, became our teachers. Back in 1966, Beijing University had become a battlefield. “It was dangerous just walking around campus,” said Teacher Dai, a soft-spoken
beauty who had helped carry out the reign of terror. “Students used slingshots and catapults to ambush their enemies. People fought each other on the sports field.” Sleep was impossible as loudspeakers blared day and night. Each faction claimed to be the true believers of Maoism and took its own prisoners and fortified its own buildings. But Beijing University was civilized compared to Qinghua University. There, the technically inclined students and faculty made rocket launchers and cannons.

In the spring of 1968, authorities sent six hundred elite troops from Chairman Mao’s own palace guard to Beijing University. Squads of hand-picked workers called Propaganda Teams of Mao Zedong Thought took over the campus administration. That summer, the faculty and staff were packed off for hard labor at Carp Island Farm in Jiangxi province in the south. Teacher Fu, who was married but childless, drove a tractor. Teacher Dai, who had a young child and an absentee husband, pleaded single parenthood and was allowed to remain on campus. In 1970, when the university again ordered Dai to the farm, she was pregnant with her second child. Fu helpfully leaked the news to the Workers Propaganda Team, and Dai was excused again, a debt to Fu she never forgot.

At first Erica and I had classes together, but we soon split up because of our vastly different levels. I got Teacher Fu, and took an instant liking to her warm smile, golden skin and waist-length braids. A former soldier and Red Guard in her early thirties, she had grown up in Henan province in central China where her father, the commander-in-chief of the Xinyang military region, had eccentrically named all of his six children Fu Min, using different ideograms for
min
. It was a stunt comparable to naming your six kids Leslee, Lesley, Leslie, Lezlee, Lezley and Lezlie.

But I soon began to regret I didn’t have Erica’s teacher — and not just because Fu spoke with a Henan accent. Dai was less strident, less dogmatic, less gung-ho. Whereas Fu was a Party member, Dai had been repeatedly rejected by the Party. Dragging her heels about going to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution had apparently sullied her record.

I suppose I got Fu because she was the most politically correct teacher they had and I was the most politically suspect student in
the whole of China. My father’s string of Chinese restaurants landed me squarely among the blood-sucking exploiting classes. “Erica has a higher level of consciousness than you,” Fu said to me one day. “Her parents are intellectuals, so they tend to criticize her more. But yours are bourgeois, so they aren’t as close to their children.” When she saw my stricken look, she hastily added, “All the teachers, including myself and Dai Guifu, love both of you equally.”

Fu’s pedagogy courses hadn’t included lectures on Your Students’ Self-Esteem. She often praised Erica’s fluent Chinese and mocked mine, and wondered aloud if I was stupid. She measured me against Erica in other ways, too. “You look just like a boy!” she exclaimed one day when I was undressing at the bathhouse. “Erica’s chest is much nicer.”

I secretly dubbed her Fu the Enforcer. Like a good Party member, she analyzed everything through the prism of class struggle. When I, a veteran of college sit-ins, balked at standing respectfully whenever she entered the room, she blamed my boorishness on my bourgeois background. When Erica was given a text on a cruel restaurant owner, Fu skipped over it for fear I would feel hurt. She had zero sense of humor, especially when it came to socialist morality. During a lesson about Norman Bethune, who had died of blood poisoning contracted while operating on the battlefield, we discussed blood types. When I joked, “Luckily I’m type AB. I can take anybody’s blood, but hardly anybody can use mine,” that only confirmed to Fu the selfishness of the capitalist class.

Without a dictionary, I often was stymied by new words. She would glare and say, rather unhelpfully, “M
bu dong!”
(“You don’t understand!”) When she felt inspired, she scribbled brief sentences on the blackboard, but “I like chairs” did little to clarify the meaning of
chair
. She would have been great teaching the hearing impaired: her last-ditch desperation technique was to shout the mystery word louder. As she turned up the volume, I learned to rap on the wall. “
Shewme
?” Erica would call from the next room. (
“What?”
) Fu would bellow out the word, and Erica would yell back a translation.

Despite her university degree, Fu the Enforcer knew next to nothing about the outside world. She was deeply suspicious, for instance,
of Western culture, and told me she had been disgusted by a 1950s performance of
Swan Lake
. “The women’s skirts were too short and the men looked as if they weren’t wearing any pants,” she said with a grimace. “Chinese don’t like to see that.” Another time, after a lengthy lecture, it dawned on me she was trying to explain the concept of a verb. When I told her English had verbs, too, she was astonished.

“They didn’t know how to teach Chinese,” Erica recalled in 1994 when I telephoned her in New Mexico to reminisce. “They thought we were retarded. They would say, ‘Raise high the red flag,’ and tell us, ‘We don’t
really
mean a red flag.’ Or they would teach us, ‘Take the correct road,’ and add, ‘It isn’t really a
road!”

Chinese were great believers in rote learning, which developed from the need to commit to memory thousands of written characters. For two hours each morning, six days a week, Fu the Enforcer stood at the front reading from notes while I sat mutely at a desk. Although I wanted to ditch the audiotapes and lectures and find real people to converse with, Fu ordered me to memorize my textbook. Whenever I interrupted her monologue with a question, she was taken aback. The tradition of rote learning had eroded the ability of many Chinese to think independently, a failing the Communists encouraged. If you were going to cram Marxist dogma into people, you needed unquestioning docility.

Fu meant well. She tried so hard to teach me she had nightmares. One morning she told me she had woken up in a sweat the night before. She had dreamed I was speaking so softly she couldn’t hear me, and all my tones were off. Despite our fights over pedagogical technique, Fu the Enforcer somehow managed to cram a hundred and twenty new words into me each week.

I was learning Mandarin, the official dialect, spoken in the capital, taught in schools nationwide and broadcast on state television and radio. Mandarin has four distinct tones, a characteristic that many Westerners have trouble grasping. “Ma” on a flat tone meant mother, a rising tone meant hemp, a dipping tone meant horse, and a sharp falling tone meant to curse. The Chinese written language is uniform throughout the country, but is pronounced differently in various regions. In all, China has eight major dialects and hundreds of minor ones, many of them mutually incomprehensible.

Chinese was actually fun. The written characters were aesthetically pleasing, the grammar minimalist, the phrases vivid. A whirlwind tour was rendered as “gazing at flowers from a galloping horse.” And they really did say things like “Long time no see.” I memorized Chairman Mao’s pithiest quotations, such as “Shit or get off the pot.” People actually recited this pearl of wisdom to one another, which Mao had once barked at a meeting when he grew exasperated at colleagues who were all talk and no action.

The more I learned, the better I understood the psyche. Communism was the holy grail, unattainable, pure, otherworldly. China was still a “socialist” country, not yet perfect enough to be a “Communist” one. Words such as
privacy
didn’t exist. Honorifics like Miss and Mrs. had been replaced by the unisex Comrade. Still other words, like
please
and
thank you
, had disappeared under decades of Communist influence. If I said, “Please pass the soy sauce,” I would get the same look I would if I curtsied to a bus driver in Montreal. “Thank you” was now appropriate only for big favors, such as when someone saved your life.

What really surprised me was that a Mao suit was called not a Mao suit but a Yat-sen suit, apparently because Dr. Sun Yat-sen had originated the fashion craze. Nor was there a word for Maoism. Instead, the Chinese modestly called the ruling theology Mao Zedong Thought, to indicate it was a notch less lofty than an -ism like Marxism-Leninism. Even more surprising, there was no word for Maoist. That was because
everyone
was a Maoist, at least at the beginning. And when they stopped being Maoists, there was only peril in advertising the fact.

Sometimes Chinese was too convoluted for my western mindset. For some reason, the language didn’t differentiate between
he, she
and
it
. There were at least eight words for rice in its various stages on the way to the table. I could never get straight the five words for aunt (or uncle or cousin), which depended on your position and theirs in a hierarchy of age, sex and matrimony. Colors especially perplexed me. Virtually the only word for brown was “coffee-colored,” which struck me as odd since coffee was a recent import.
Huang
meant anything from yellow to brown.
Bai
sometimes meant white, sometimes colorless. The color
qing
(pronounced
ching
) could mean, depending on context, black, indigo, sky blue, grass green or celadon. A
qing mian
was a green pallor. But
qing jin
meant blue veins. When used to describe the color of cloth or a girl’s hair,
qing
meant black.

Like me, Scarlet and her classmates studied Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao exclusively and were taught only by politically correct teachers. As Madame Mao and her cohorts increased their influence over educational policy, Scarlet’s class was encouraged to debate whether English classes were necessary. A male student said, “I’m a peasant. When I graduate, I’m going back to serve the peasants. Why do I need to know English?” Another declared: “English is useless to us. Our time would be better spent on studying class struggle, Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.” English classes soon became voluntary. Scarlet stopped trying to speak English to me and dropped out of the course.

It wasn’t easy for us to adjust to each other. When I tried to pass the two-hour siesta by writing in my diary, the rustling pages kept her awake. Being my roommate was all risk and no reward. In addition to having to report on me, she had to obey
waishi jilu
, or disciplinary rules of foreign contacts. One slip of the tongue could have plunged her in trouble. I was too naive to know these rules existed. All I knew was that she was driving me crazy with her revolutionary zeal.

Scarlet took the burden of being my helpmate very seriously. The school had secretly told her that Premier Zhou Enlai had personally approved my studies at the university. For some reason, they had also told her that my father had played a major role in the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and China, which wasn’t true. In Scarlet’s eyes, therefore, we weren’t just two college roommates; we were a mini-summit. If she messed up, China would lose face.

Scarlet insisted on giving me the armoire all to myself, tucking her own clothes under her pillow. I once had to lie on my bed to prevent her from washing my sheets. And she monopolized the chores. At 5:30 a.m., she’d roll out of bed and mop our floor. Paralyzed by pre-dawn pain, I listened guiltily to the slap, slap, slap
of a wet mop against the concrete floor. If I staggered down the hall to the toilet, she folded my quilt before I got back. If I left my roll of toilet paper on my bed, she tucked it under my quilt. If I flung my damp towel across my chair, she hung it straight. If I left my comb on the bookshelf, she straightened it so that it was parallel to the edge of the shelf I returned from class once to find that she had reorganized all my books by size and color. I had come to see a revolution, and I was stuck with a dull conformist.

Although she was a history student, she couldn’t believe that the Picasso-like rubbing of a nude I tacked on our wall was from the Han dynasty, which had begun in 206 B.C. “Ugly,” she said flatly. To my irritation, she rarely questioned anything and sat at her desk memorizing her lessons. When I asked for help with my homework, she would stare at my textbook for a moment, shake her head dejectedly and reply, “Haven’t learned that yet.” I felt like shaking her. By the time my Chinese was good enough to manage a conversation, we were barely on speaking terms. I confided my frustration to Erica, who offered to help. That evening, she stopped by our room and opened the floodgates with a simple question: “How were you able to leave Yanan and come to Beijing University?” Scarlet began talking so animatedly that she missed a meeting, and I skipped my shower at the public bathhouse.