Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (27 page)

Working for the
Times
made me begin to view China through dispassionate eyes. Although I felt like a renegade and traitor when I helped Fox Butterfield dig out dirt on a country I had once wanted to be perfect, I also felt that exposing the darker side might help right some wrongs. Twice a day I stopped at Democracy Wall to scan new posters. After the government passed a decree banning them and municipal workers hosed down the wall, I slipped into private homes to watch dissidents mimeographing their latest samizdat. I would bump into some of them eight years later, when I returned as a
Globe and Mail
reporter, and they were still fighting for democracy.

As I became a skeptic, I found myself changing in other ways. I was no longer as tolerant of China’s problems as before. I was crabby, irritable, short-tempered. Perhaps the average Chinese dealt with the population explosion by tuning out, but I got heartily sick of people walking smack into me as if I didn’t exist. I learned to point my elbows outward, became expert at crowding onto buses and snapped back at people whenever they snapped at me. At the Beijing Hotel, where I didn’t realize the staff was learning about the
mysteries of Western etiquette, I got into a tug-of-war with a young waiter who grabbed my chair just as I was about to sit down. I snatched it back, glaring at him.

“This is my chair,” I barked. “You can go find another one.”

“I was trying to pull it out for you,” he said.

I think I finally crossed some invisible line in early 1980, when my matchmaker friend Betty asked me to appear on national television to tell the Chinese people about Christmas. Chinese Central Television wanted to broadcast an hour-long English special during the Lunar New Year holidays, when it had its biggest audience of the year. “Four hundred million people will be watching,” she said. “Can you help?”

By then, Madame Mao was in solitary confinement, and Betty was no longer in trouble for discussing the Dragon Lady’s past love life. In fact, Betty had become the most famous English teacher in China. To meet the huge demand for education following the end of the Cultural Revolution, authorities had launched “Television University,” a series of televised credit courses for the masses. Three times a week, Betty explained the mysteries of English grammar on national television to an audience of millions. A companion textbook she co-authored sold 1.6 million copies and could easily have sold more if it wasn’t for a paper shortage. Alas, Betty got zero royalties and earned only about a dollar per broadcast. But fans sent her sacks of potatoes and oranges, porcelain tea sets and bags of rice. In crowded restaurants, admirers jumped up to give her their tables. Wrote one Shanghai devotee: “I have switched from the day shift to the night shift so I can catch your program.” A soldier on the Soviet border who received an autographed copy of her textbook promised in a fan letter, “Tomorrow at the riflery competition, I’ll fire in the air as a salute to you!”

My plan had been to tell the West about how great China was, yet I found myself agreeing to tell China how wonderful the
West
was, and not just explain but do unabashed propaganda, complete with Christmas carols. Betty recruited Big Xu and their two young children. Norman claimed he was too busy at the Academy of Science to have anything to do with the project. I talked an American, Peter Gilmartin, into donning a Santa outfit
lent by the U.S. Embassy. A China-born British friend, Michael Crook, mystified the audience with an erudite lecture on the historical origins of Christmas. On a set decorated with a fake tree, also courtesy of the U.S. Embassy, we all sang “Jingle Bells.” I played “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” on my flute. Another friend played the guitar. And we made up some really bad jokes. They had nothing to do with Christmas, but were supposed to help viewers practice English.

Sample: What is black and white and red all over?

Answer: A blushing panda.

Stuffing and roasting a turkey seemed ambitious, so I decided, for reasons I now can’t fathom, to demonstrate holiday punch. I completely fabricated the recipe. In an enamel wash basin, I dumped the contents of a bottle of sickly-sweet orange syrup and two varieties of plonk, China Red Wine and China White Wine (their real names). With the cameras rolling, I briskly diced a couple of apples and pears with a Chinese cleaver, talking up a storm
à la
Julia Child. Punch with diced fruit? Perhaps I should have demonstrated the Heimlich maneuver, too. Fatalities weren’t reported in those happy-face media days, so I’m not sure how many viewers subsequently choked to death. But I certainly began to respect the power of propaganda. The day after the show aired, as I wandered around the Temple of Heaven, I kept hearing people humming “Jingle Bells.”

In May 1980, the Academy of Science assigned Norman a brand-new two-bedroom apartment with real kitchen cupboards. I thought it was the most beautiful home in the world. After a fourteen-year wait, he was at last working in computers. I was having a great time working for the
Times
. And although we still had no hot water, we had a real bathtub. What more could we want? But I was already changing. I knew I could not spend the rest of my life in China.

Many of our foreign friends had done just that – committed themselves to working for the Chinese Revolution. They were the modern, Maoist inheritors of a Western missionary tradition that dated back to the eighteenth century. They came to help save China, and they did not flinch at personal sacrifice. These veteran
China Hands had arrived in the 1940s and 1950s, abandoning careers in the West as doctors, lawyers, labor organizers, journalists, sociologists and economists. Many had witnessed the founding of the Peoples Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Almost all had met Mao.

By the Cultural Revolution, there were only two dozen of these “lifers” left from English-speaking countries. Half ended up in jail or under house arrest on spy charges, spending an average of four or five years in solitary confinement. At least one of them had betrayed others. None had trials. And all were exonerated after their release. (One American, Sidney Rittenberg, spent ten years in solitary during the Cultural Revolution, and that was his second prison term. His first stint in solitary, in the 1950s, lasted six years.)

Two of our good friends among the old China Hands were Joan Hinton and Sid Engst, the American couple who had taken Norman in. They wore faded Mao suits and spoke fluent Chinese with a Shaanxi accent, picked up in the central province where they had first settled as farm technicians. Norman and I spent most weekends with them, biking two and a half hours to the Red Star Commune, their home during the last half of the Cultural Revolution.

By the time I met Joan and Sid in 1975, they had been in China for more than twenty-five years. I admired them because they were so dedicated and selfless. Yet in some ways, they were frozen in time. Joan once used the word
Chinaman
with me. I froze. How could someone who had devoted her life to China be racist? She saw my face, and realized something was wrong. Later, she explained that when she was growing up in Boston in the 1920s,
Chinaman
was the common term for a Chinese. She never used it again.

Joan was an atomic physicist who had helped build the Bomb. An independent-minded beauty with bright blue eyes and blond hair that had faded to silver, she’d had a proper New England upbringing that included violin lessons, her own pony and Bennington, a women’s college in Vermont. Somehow, in the ensuing years, she had learned to burp after her meals just like a Chinese peasant.

Sid, a thin, balding man with bushy eyebrows and a ski-slope nose, was a farmer from Gooseville Corners in upstate NewYork.
After majoring in agriculture at Cornell, he went to China in 1946 with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While investigating a famine in Hunan province, the shock of seeing destitute women selling their dull-eyed children for a sack of rice as fat officials drove by in fancy cars converted Sid overnight to communism. At twenty-seven, he made his way to Yanan, the communists’ wartime capital, where he was assigned the task of keeping a precious herd of imported Holstein cows out of range of Chiang Kai-shek’s bombers. He met Mao there and was impressed by his charisma. “Mao shook hands and looked at me,” recalled Sid, who didn’t yet know Chinese. “You got the idea he was looking right into you.”

Joan and Sid first met through Joan’s brother, Bill, who had roomed with Sid at Cornell. When Sid left for China, Joan was working on the atom bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She wrote regularly, not ordinary love letters but lyrical essays about the black hole, the beauty of atomic physics, the life cycle of stars. “He wiped his ass with my letters because he didn’t have anything better while they were evacuating Yanan,” Joan remembered with a laugh. As one of the few female physicists working with the renowned Enrico Fermi, she had the world at her feet. But she quit when the bombs she helped create were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We had this illusion that if this was in the hands of the scientists, we might be able to control it,” Joan later told a British documentary film producer. “One hundred and fifty thousand lives, each a living human being — all gone – and I had held that bomb in my hand. I knew what I was against. I wasn’t at all sure what I was for.”

Joan decided to go to China to find out. Normally, a scientist of her background needed clearance to leave the U.S., but on her passport application, Joan said she was going overseas to get married. That made sense to the bureaucrat who stamped her application. “They always think that women run after men,” said Joan. “I wouldn’t have left nuclear physics except for the Chinese revolution, but Sid made it that much easier to leave.” At age twenty-seven, she took a slow boat to China and made her way past the Guomindang blockades, arriving in Yanan in March 1949. She married Sid a few days later.
Their Chinese comrades gave them new names: Joan became Cold Spring and Sid became Morning Sun.

It took three years for the U.S. government to realize that one of its top atomic physicists had slipped over to Red China. At a peace conference in Beijing in 1952, Joan caused an international sensation when she publicly apologized for her country’s bombing of Japan. Headline writers in the U.S. labeled her “the spy that got away.” Magazines printed wild rumors: Joan had flown to the peace conference on Mao’s private plane; she had given the blueprint for the atom bomb to Red China; she was setting up top-secret installations in Inner Mongolia. The truth was more prosaic. Joan and Sid were working on a dairy farm in Shaanxi province. To get to the peace conference, she hiked seven days to Yanan, hitched a ride on a truck to Xian and from there caught a train to Beijing. Joan was never allowed to work in physics in China. Beijing considered all foreigners, even friendly Maoists, potential spies. The closest she ever got to a Chinese laboratory was helping unpack some imported equipment at a university in Xian.

Joan and Sid had renounced the capitalist world. They saw no reason why their three children, Fred, Billy and Karen, needed English, and spoke only Chinese to them. In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War, Joan and Sid volunteered to work in North Vietnam. “After we sent the letter to the Hanoi government, we called a meeting with our three children,” said Sid. “We told them, ‘You will probably have to live without your parents. You will probably be adopted by the Chinese government.’ ” Three decades later, I asked Karen, who was nine at the time, how she had felt. “I wanted to volunteer as well,” she said with a chuckle. Hanoi politely thanked Joan and Sid for their offer, but explained they weren’t accepting foreign volunteers.

In April 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, authorities transferred Joan and Sid to desk jobs in Beijing. In the capital, which was much tenser than the provinces, their young children suddenly found themselves ostracized. Karen’s teacher warned the class that the little American girl might be a spy. When the ten-year-old realized she was the evil imperialist she had been taught to hate, she had a mental breakdown. She recovered only after Joan and Sid
fought to have her treated like an ordinary Chinese kid, which included going, with her brother Billy, for several years of labor on a tea plantation in Anhui province.

Despite the intense xenophobia of those years, Joan and Sid were two of the happiest people I knew. But I could no longer believe in monotheistic Maoism as they did. So many people had suffered, and so many had died, for such trivial reasons. Both Norman and I still cared about what would happen next and we both wanted to spend more time in China — but not as Maoist missionaries. We decided to go back to school. Norman applied to graduate school at New York University and planned to work again in China’s computer industry after earning a Ph.D. I applied to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and dreamed of returning as a foreign correspondent. We left behind virtually all our belongings, including our eight and a half sets of Mao’s
Selected Works
and a brand-new Snowflake refrigerator, which had cost a year of Norman’s pay.

We left China in August 1980. A year earlier, Billy had gone to the States and had gotten off the plane in the wrong city, unable to tell the difference between airport signs that said San Francisco and Los Angeles. Karen was now about to leave to study molecular biology at Yale, her first trip out of China, and we decided we’d better take her with us. Karen was the mirror image of me when I first crossed the border alone into China in 1972. Although she had blue eyes, blond hair and an American passport, for all practical purposes she was Chinese. At twenty-four, she had just spent four years picking tea leaves and knew only a few words of English.

At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, a U.S. customs official was immediately suspicious.
Whaddaya mean, she speaks only Chinese?
He tore apart her luggage. Just as I had filled my suitcase with toilet paper when I first went to China, so Karen had crammed her suitcase with wrinkly gray stuff because I had warned her American toilet paper cost almost 50 cents a roll. Karen was upset as she saw her belongings piling up on the inspection table. It had taken her a long time to squash all that toilet paper into her suitcase. With a triumphant snort, the customs official held up a small box full of plastic vials of dark brown liquid.