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

John Pearce, editor-in-chief of Doubleday Canada, first approached me with the idea of writing a book, and stayed enthusiastic for five more years while I finished my posting in Beijing. He read several very rough drafts, and with great tact and grace, helped steer me in the right direction. Charles Conrad, editor-in-chief of Anchor Books, New York, made invaluable suggestions and kept me true to the spirit of the book. Shaun Oakey did a masterful job of copy-editing the manuscript. Michael Cohn, my agent, was always there when I needed him.

I thank Norman Webster, former editor-in-chief of the
Globe and Mail
(and former Beijing correspondent), and Geoff Stevens, former managing editor, for sending me to Beijing. I also thank William Thorsell, my subsequent editor-in-chief, for keeping me there, and John Cruickshank, my subsequent managing editor, who saw to it that I got a year’s book leave upon my return. I thank the Canada Council for providing a timely grant.

In Beijing, my fellow journalists Catherine Sampson and Lena Sun gave me their indispensable friendship, valued insights and professional expertise. Later, Cathy read several early drafts and made numerous helpful suggestions and corrections from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Hong Kong. Lena read later drafts in Washington, D.C., helped me with queries and saved me from myself many, many times. Thanks also to my matchmakers, Zheng Peidi (Betty) and Xu Shimin (Saiman Hui), who helped me render the title into Chinese. They also read a draft and corrected several errors. Any remaining mistakes, of course, are my own.

Many friends taught me so much about China. They include the old revolutionaries who went to work there: Pat Adler and her late husband, Sol, Betty Chandler, Ruth Coe and her late husband, Frank, Isabel and David Crook and their remarkable sons, Carl, Michael and Paul, Israel Epstein and his late wife, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, Kathy Chiù and Bill Hinton, Joan Hinton and Sid Engst and their children, Fred, Billy and Karen, lone Kramer, Sidney and Yulin Rittenberg, the late Julian Schuman, Sidney Shapiro, Bertha Sneck, Jane Su, Ruth Weiss, and Gladys and Yang Xianyi and their daughter and my classmate, Yang Zhi.

They also include former classmates and friends, now diplomats, aid workers, businesspeople and sinologists: Patricia Alexander, Anu Arponen, Timothy Brook, Neil Burton, Anders Hansson, Peter and Chris Gilmartin, Pat and Roger Howard, Ellen Judd, Frank and Dorothy Kehl, Britta Kinnemark, Nick Menzies, Sandra Sacks and Ola Svensson.

My fellow Overseas Chinese, with whom I could discuss anything, include Norman Bock, Maria Fang, David Hsieh, George Leung, Ben Mok, Bing and Bonnie Thorn and Wenlan Peng. I also thank the MSG Club members, the Macho Sino Girls of our elitist, racist, sexist club in Beijing, whose founders included journalists Charlene Fu, Lena Sun, Mary Wong and Sheryl WuDunn.

Diplomats and other professionals working in China who gave me friendship and generously shared their knowledge include: Mary Ann Burris, Daniel Dhavernas, Earl and Monica Gruder Drake, John Hecht and Laura Sabin, Normand Mailhot, Don Myatt, Michel Riberdy, Judith Standley and Tse Hau-sing.

I especially thank these journalists and colleagues in China and Hong Kong: Jim Abrams, Zorana Bakovic, Daniel Biers, Diana Bishop, Louise Branson, Michael Browning, Sandra Burton, Mike Chinoy, Robert Delfs, Seth Faison, Jaime FlorCuz, Edward Gargan, Caroline Gracie, David and Fumio Holley, Susan Lawrence, LeeYee, Julia Leung, Simon Long, Timothy Luard, Robert MacPherson, Jim and Cathy McGregor, James Miles, Jim Munson, Judy Polumbaum, Caroline Straathof, Mia Turner and Kathy Wilhelm.

Among the Chinese friends who have left China and can be thanked are Chi Ching, my indispensable news assistant Yan Yan and her successor, Stella Wu. There are many, many others to thank who cannot be named. They include several classmates, a filmmaker, a novelist, two journalists, a laid-off factory worker, an office worker, several dissidents, student activists and a seamstress.

Professors Ella Laffey and Paul Lin of McGill University gave me an appreciation of the complexities of China’s history. Many more people have guided and influenced my career as a journalist. I especially thank:
The New York Times’s
Fox Butterfield and James Sterba, who showed me how much fun being a foreign correspondent could be; Professor Melvin Mencher of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism for teaching me the nuts and bolts of reporting and how, above all, to keep that fire in the belly; Joseph Gelmon, my copy chief at the Montreal
Gazette
, who fed me dinner while I watched “Lou Grant,” and valued colleagues Jay Bryan, Janet Brooks, Jennifer Hunter, David Pinto and Shirley Won; my editors and colleagues at the
Boston Globe
, Gordon McKibben, Lincoln Millstein, Steve Bailey, Jane Meredith Adams, Kathryn Tolbert and Jonathan Kaufman; and my bureau chief and colleagues at the
Wall Street Journal
, June Kronholz, David Wessel and David Stipp.

I owe a great debt to my editors and colleagues at the
Globe and Mail.
Timothy Pritchard hired me as a business reporter and didn’t mind when I ran off to Beijing soon after. Sue Andrew of the foreign desk always kept the money flowing, even when I was five months behind in my expense accounts during Tiananmen Square. Ann Rauhala, my foreign editor, was unfailingly encouraging, as were her two deputies, Jane Gadd and Larry Orenstein. Colleagues Alexandra Eadie, Stephen Strauss and Elinor Reading always kept the in-house gossip flowing so I would not feel completely isolated in Beijing. Amanda Valpy, the chief librarian, and her colleagues helped me retrieve photos I had taken in China for the
Globe
and obtained permission for me to use them in this book.

In Toronto, my Aunt Ming and Uncle Ying, now both in their eighties, and my cousin Colleen Parrish Yao, helped me trace the family history. My Uncle Yao provided the Chinese calligraphy for the jacket. My sister, Gigi, provided computer advice no matter what time of the day or night and helped me recall some of the funnier incidents in China. My parents, Bill and Eva Wong, instilled in me an abiding curiosity about the country of my ancestors and put up with my Maoist phase unfazed.

In Beijing, my Chinese staff did everything so I could concentrate on journalism. In Toronto, Mercedita Iboro took over the housework, the cookie baking and the care of my sons, making it possible for me to write this book. Ben, then four, learned that a chair placed in front of the entrance to the living room, which led to my sunroom office, meant No Entry, and soon taught his brother, Sam, then one, the same. My husband, Norman, has been unfailingly supportive and loving, giving up his career to follow me back to Beijing, changing the majority of the diapers for our sons and correcting my drafts while taking the subway to his new job in Toronto.

To help readers cope with a plethora of Chinese names, wherever possible I have tagged on titles, such as Chancellor Zhou or Professor Ding or Cook Mu. Mao’s radical wife, Jiang Qing, becomes Madame Mao. I also have translated the names of a few characters who figure prominently in the book. Some might argue that this renders them cartoonish or unnecessarily exotic, but it is intended primarily as a memory aide. Translations are also interesting because political movements influenced the choice of many parents. My classmate, Gu Weiming (Future Gu), was born just after the Communist takeover when Chinese were optimistic about the future. My first roommate changed her name to Scarlet during the Cultural Revolution, when anything red was good. Chinese speakers will notice I sometimes take liberties. The name of Mao Zedong’s grandson, Xinyu, for instance, literally means New Universe, but in English I think the meaning is more faithfully rendered as New World.

In a very few cases, I have altered names and place names to protect people. I do not always make this clear because I do not want to tip off the Chinese authorities.

I have used pinyin, the official system of romanization in the People’s Republic of China. It has been adopted by the United Nations and other world agencies, many governments, journalists and scholars. Pinyin is generally pronounced as it looks, with the following exceptions:
c
is pronounced
ts, q
is pronounced
ch, zh
is pronounced
j
and
x
is pronounced
hs
. In pinyin, Peking becomes Beijing, Mao Tse-tung becomes Mao Zedong and the Kuomintang becomes the Guomindang. In the interest of clarity, I have made a few exceptions where alternative spellings are well established in English: Canton, Nanking, tai-chi, SunYat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek.

The vernacular term for the common people is
lao bai xing
, or Old Hundred Surnames. With only about a hundred family names in common use in China, some are more ubiquitous than the commonest Western surnames. The 1995 Toronto phone directory, for instance, lists three pages of Joneses, eight pages of Smiths and seven pages of Wongs, even though ethnic Chinese account for less than 7 percent of Toronto’s population. Chinese minimize confusion by dubbing acquaintances Big Wang, Little Wang, Old Wang, Mama Wang, Old Man Wang, Granddad Wang, Uncle Wang, Auntie Wang, Granny Wang and so forth. The reader should never assume that people with the same surname are related unless that is specifically stated. Family names, by the way, precede personal names in Chinese, just one indication of the paramount importance of the family over the individual.

Finally, all dollars are U.S. dollars.

PROLOGUE
Brave New World