Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (22 page)

By 1968, Jack and Ruth were fed up with the murders, the chaos and the ceaseless, ear-splitting broadcasts as the factional fighting of
the various Red Guard groups in the schools surrounding the Friendship Hotel where they lived continued for a second year. They decided to go home. Then they discovered China wanted them to stay permanently and join the tiny band of sympathetic Maoist China Hands. Beijing’s method of persuasion was to refuse to issue exit permits. Jack grew a beard in protest, but everyone just assumed he had run out of razor blades. He and Ruth and another American couple, who were also refused exist permits, began to picket Premier Zhou’s office. The sight of foreign detainees pacing dejectedly outside a government office touched a nerve. After six months, Jack and Ruth were allowed to leave. (The other couple, David and Nancy Milton, were able to leave only in November 1969.)

With Jack gone, Norman had nowhere to live. An American couple, Joan Hinton and Sid Engst, invited him to sleep on their living-room couch. Cultural Revolution infighting had paralyzed Joan’s and Sid’s work units, so to pass the time they worked as volunteers pruning grapevines at the Sino-Albanian Friendship Commune and cutting ice from a frozen lake for summer storage. Norman’s school had shut down, so he joined them. The sight of the three foreign devils astonished the peasants. A few tried plucking the hair on Norman’s arms to see if it was real. Later, authorities assigned him a temporary job at the Beijing Number Two General Machinery Works. There, too, he was the first foreigner some of the workers had ever seen. A young female worker chatted with him in the canteen for several minutes, in Chinese, of course, when she suddenly broke off and looked puzzled. “Do you speak Chinese?” she asked.

If you believe draft dodgers are a lower form of life, then there
is
justice. In January 1970, Norman was transferred to
China Reconstructs
, where he was doomed to spend the next eight years in propaganda boot camp translating drivel like “advance in the wake of glory” or “promote proletarian and eradicate bourgeois ideology.”
China Reconstructs
was part of the Foreign Languages Press, a gargantuan publishing house founded in the 1950s to churn out novels, travelogues and periodicals. But while the avowed aim of the press was to win friends and influence people, it wasn’t a very friendly place. On Norman’s first day there, the
Party secretary coldly told him, “We don’t need anyone, and we haven’t asked for anyone.”

One reason people weren’t very friendly was because a dozen people had been murdered there recently, and the killers were still all working at the Press. Initially, the cause of death in each case had been listed as “suicide by leaping from fourth-floor windows.” An emissary sent by Premier Zhou Enlai ended up dead after he made the intriguing discovery that not a single corpse had a broken bone. By the time Norman arrived, an army investigation had concluded that the victims had all been wrapped in padded quilts and beaten to death.

Of the one thousand employees at the Press, about half were politically suspect people who had lived overseas or attended missionary schools and were fluent in foreign languages. The other half were politically correct hotheads whose total foreign-language expertise stemmed from a six-month crash course in the Fragrant Hills, near Beijing. The latter group was young, xenophobic, impressionable and completely indoctrinated. The members of the Fragrant Hills faction, as they were known, were all Communist Party members, all demobilized soldiers and all former Red Guards. It did not take much to ignite this volatile mix, and soon the press was the scene of torture, beatings and bloodshed.

Most people in the English section of
China Reconstructs
worked together in one large room resembling an old-fashioned insurance office. Scarred wooden desks lined the walls. Employees wore sleeve protectors over their jackets. When the lunch bell rang one day, several young staffers jumped out of their seats in order to be the first in line at the canteen. As they raced out the door, Norman couldn’t help joking, “When thunder claps, the wind follows,” a Lin Biao quotation exhorting Chinese to react instantly to a command from Chairman Mao. The lunch bunch, all members of the Fragrant Hills faction, was not amused. They did not appreciate quips about the sacred words of Mao’s “closest comrade-in-arms.” Nor did they like their enthusiasm for lunch compared to their fervor for Mao, least of all by a young American.

The Fragrant Hills faction decided to teach Norman a lesson. The English section chief of
China Reconstructs
, Liu Zongren, organized a criticism meeting. But what was there to criticize about a
guy who hardly ever said anything and demanded to be paid as badly as a Chinese? The only incriminating thing they could find was Norman’s disconcerting habit of removing the pants of his Mao suit in public. It wasn’t that he was a pervert. At the meeting, Norman explained that he got too hot wearing so many layers while biking to work in the winter, but that he needed to dress warmly once he got to the barely heated office. That was why he always donned his final layer of padded clothing beside his desk. To do so, he had to take off his outer pants momentarily “Whenever I do that,” he assured everyone, “I always have three more layers on underneath.”

But Section Chief Liu was undeterred. He had had the foresight to enlist the help of a plump, jolly woman who had lived in the States for many years. He turned to Liu Yifang and played his trump card. “Is it true,” he asked, “that in American offices men don’t change their pants at their desk?” Comrade Liu, who was at risk herself for her U.S. connections, solemnly assured everyone, “No normal American would do such a thing.”

Section Chief Liu glared at Norman. “You are insulting Chinese women!” he thundered.

“I’m very sorry,” said Norman, giving up. “I won’t do it again. I apologize for offending everyone.”

Four months later, Section Chief Liu, accused of “brazenly attacking Mao” for a remark he made about Madame Mao, was led away in handcuffs. But after she was toppled, Liu was considered prescient and returned to
China Reconstructs
a hero. One day, he bumped into Norman in the stairwell. His own ups and downs had taught him a lesson, and he apologized.

In 1972, the army investigation blamed the Fragrant Hills faction for most of the deaths. Six of the worst offenders were paraded at a huge denunciation meeting. They were never sentenced, but each spent about five years in prison. By the late 1970s, they were back, working beside their victims’ next of kin. In the meantime,
China Reconstructs
continued to publish happy stories about dam-building feats.

By late fall, our stint at Big Joy was nearly over. We harvested our rice crop and ate it for supper that first night. The grains were pearly
and amazingly sweet. I closed my eyes as I slowly chewed a mouthful. It was the first time in my life I had tasted fresh rice instead of stuff that had been warehoused for years. I thought of all the hours and days we had sweated in order to get this bowlful, and I took another mouthful. After we harvested the last of our peanuts, tomatoes and eggplants, it was time to return to campus.

Back in Beijing, I began seeing Norman regularly. Did we date? Go to discos? Take in a revolutionary opera? No, we joined a study group and read all three volumes of
Das Kapital
. When I telephoned his office,
China Reconstructs
went on red alert. Whoever answered would cover the receiver and mimic my girlish voice: “Is Fat Paycheck Shulman there?” They loved to watch Norman blush after nine years of bachelorhood.

Beijing University was less tolerant. By late 1975, it was trying to cope with an influx of several hundred foreign students. Even though many were earnest Maoists like me, they still hated the 6 a.m. reveille. One morning, someone hooked up a cassette player to the public address system. Instead of “The East Is Red,” we got Mick Jagger belting out “Satisfaction.” The Ministry of Propaganda couldn’t have dreamed up anything better to illustrate Western decadence. The foreign students didn’t just sleep around; they slept
in
.

I was slightly more restrained, having spent so much time reforming myself at Big Joy Farm. Still, I was twenty-three by then, and interested in guys, even skinny ones who resembled Viet Cong POWs. During physical labor on campus one afternoon, I accidentally dropped a brick on my foot and broke my toe. My roommate began fetching my meals from the Big Canteen, and they tasted much worse cold. Norman knew that the way to my heart was through my stomach. He introduced that New York staple, Chinese take-out, to mainland China, which meant taking an aluminum lunch box to the Long March Restaurant across the street and having them fill it up with the daily special. It was love at first bite.

Cadre Huang looked grim. I knew Norman had been caught the night before as he left the campus. “What do your parents think about Fat Paycheck Shulman?” he said, with an unpleasant giggle. Only Cadre Huang could giggle and look grim at the same time.
My parents, who were vehement about not marrying outside the tribe, would be upset, of course.
She went all the way to China and found a Big Nose! She wasn’t even in Montreal and she still married a New York draft dodger!
But I wasn’t about to admit anything to Cadre Huang.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We are supposed to take good care of you on behalf of your parents. We don’t think they would want you to make friends with Fat Paycheck Shulman,” he said. “Make friends” was a Chinese euphemism for getting engaged.

“You don’t tell the other foreign students what to do. Why are you telling me?”

Cadre Huang looked at me as if it were obvious. “You’re an Overseas Chinese. You’re one of us.”

But I had changed. I had once obeyed the Chinese when they ordered me to break off a friendship. I had no intention of doing so again. I stared belligerently at Cadre Huang. He looked confused. This was not the Bright Precious Wong he knew. He tried another tack.

“Fat Paycheck Shulman,” he said, “was breaking the rules.” This was a serious charge. China was a country of rules.

“What rules?” I said, as disingenuously as I could.

Cadre Huang was getting flustered. He did not want to be specific. “People who aren’t students here aren’t allowed to spend the night,” he said finally.

I thought of all my Italian friends who were enjoying
la dolce vita
. I thought of my Japanese classmate who was besotted with an Icelandic student, whom she would later marry.
They
hadn’t been called in for criticism.

“Post the rules for everyone to see! And enforce them for everyone!” I yelled. I was sick of the double standard. How dare Cadre Huang discriminate against me. How dare he interfere in my life. I had changed. I no longer felt that because I was “family” I should have to sleep on the floor, so to speak. I refused to endure the same kind of humiliation every Chinese endured. I told Cadre Huang to go to hell. We started shouting at each other. I burst into tears and stomped out.

Cadre Huang telephoned
China Reconstructs
. Betty’s husband, who had become Norman’s group leader after Section Chief Liu’s arrest, took the call.

Huang dispensed with the chitchat. “What is Fat Paycheck Shulman’s behavior like at
China Reconstructs?”
he demanded.

“He’s a very serious person,” said Xu Shimin, whom we all called Big Xu. “He doesn’t like his job. He talks very little.” It was a brilliant fourteen-word summary of Norman.

Huang wasn’t satisfied. “Does he have any problems in the male-female area?” he asked.

“No,” Big Xu replied. “Fat Paycheck Shulman is very serious and hard-working. He doesn’t have this problem. What is your purpose in asking this?”

“He spent the night in the foreign students’ dormitory,” said Huang. He paused. “And he didn’t register at the front gate.” It was hard to tell which he thought was worse. Norman had long ago ceased filling out the detailed visitor forms at the gate, which were supposed to screen out all class enemies willing to write down their names, work units and exactly whom they were planning to murder.

“Was he with Bright Precious Wong?” asked Big Xu.

Cadre Huang was taken aback. “Yes. How did you know?”

“We introduced them. My wife and I want them to become friends. As foreigners in Beijing, they are quite lonely. We wanted to see if there was any possibility the relationship would develop.” Like Huang, Big Xu was a master of euphemism. “Develop” was a catchall phrase for dating, fooling around, getting married, having babies.

There was silence on the other end. Cadre Huang said, “Oh, so that’s the way it is. I just wanted to know his political background and his behavioral record.”

Big Xu hung up the phone. After work that day, he pulled Norman aside. “The university called today to check whether you are a decent guy. They also wanted to know why you stayed there for the night.” Norman blushed.

“Don’t worry,” said Big Xu. “I told them you were a good comrade.” Then he winked.