Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (29 page)

Amidst this chaos, siren-wailing military-style motorcades became a daily plague. Swollen with self-importance, senior officials hogged the already crowded roads. Their fleets of Mercedes-Benzes barreled through busy intersections without regard to life or limb, as traffic police frantically shooed the rest of us aside like so many gnats. The highway to the Great Wall even had a special VIP lane right down the center. One day, a southbound convoy collided head-on with a northbound convoy. That’s when the masses saw the value of giving senior officials their very own lane.

All the Mao portraits were gone, except for the giant one in Tiananmen Square; virtually all had been replaced with neon signs advertising French cognac and Japanese televisions. The first real bars had opened. Stores sold Chinese-made tampons and decent toilet paper, but I was pleased to see the gray wrinkly stuff was still
available. There were even padded bras, false eyelashes and the kind of underwear that had undone the Pyongyang panty thief.

The standard of living may have risen dramatically, but not everything was an improvement. The brilliant blue skies I so loved had disappeared in a yellow smog, the result of an unbridled industrial revolution and no unleaded gasoline. Once, I had been able to see as far as the Fragrant Hills, twenty miles away. Now I couldn’t see clearly beyond the next block. Even on days when I stayed indoors, my nostrils were black with grime. Plastic bags used to be so scarce they cost half a day’s pay. Now one way to measure the ferocity of a winter dust storm was to count the number of dirty bags stuck in the tree branches.

A lot more people smoked, including many young women. By the late 1980s, China had become the biggest consumer of cigarettes in the world, averaging seventy-five packs a year for every man, woman and child. That added up to 1.7 trillion cigarettes annually, or more than Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and North America
combined
. Nobody seemed to be aware of the dangers of lung cancer. The government certainly wasn’t saying. Its tobacco monopoly, after all, produced more than one-quarter of all taxes and state profits.

The relaxed atmosphere, however, delighted me. Compared to the old Maoist days, when people were afraid of their own shadows, China now seemed free and open. Instead of bumper-harvest reports, newspapers printed frank stories about rude salesclerks, spoiled children and the rising crime rate. Ordinary citizens seemed remarkably blasé about being interviewed. They rarely requested a pseudonym and didn’t mind having their picture taken.

People laughed when I told them I had been a worker-peasant-soldier foreign student back in the 1970s. They laughed harder when I said I had worked on a farm. Even my language was archaic. No one called anyone Comrade, any more. I found it so hard to say Miss, Mrs. and Mr. in Chinese, titles that were once unspeakably bourgeois. When I referred to Norman as my
ai ven
, the Maoist word for spouse, people tittered because it literally meant lover. Now everyone had “husbands” and “wives.” I had to learn a whole new vocabulary:
generation gap, inflation, human rights
and
Sprite
.

I wasn’t certain how much surveillance I was under. I knew my mail was being checked because the post office still confiscated my magazines. I warned contacts not to use their real names over the phone. “Just keep talking,” I urged, “and eventually I’ll figure out who you are.” But most Chinese thought the bad old days were over and that I was being paranoid. Younger Chinese, especially, thought they were untouchable and blurted out their names every time.

Sex was no longer a taboo topic. I attended the first nude art show in the history of the People’s Republic of China. And one of my first interviews was with a Chinese Ann Landers who breezily dispensed advice on unrequited love, frigidity and extra-marital sex.

“My husband has been impotent for years,” one reader wrote to the
Chinese Women’s Journal
(circulation: 500,000). “I can’t have the warmth and happiness a woman should have. I want a divorce and my husband agrees. But the officials object, citing Marxist-Leninist principles.” It was signed “Hoping for Springtime.”

Qiu Ming, the columnist, replied: “Dear Springtime: I’ve tried my best to search through the works of Marx and Lenin, but nowhere do I find any discussion of whether divorce is permissible if a husband and wife can’t have a normal sex life. If you and your husband want a divorce, that’s entirely your own business.”

But I knew things had really changed when I got my first obscene phone call, in
English
. After all, in the old days people didn’t even have phones.

“Do you want to sex intercourse?” a young male voice said. He clearly knew he was dialing a phone number belonging to a foreigner; we were restricted to a special exchange.

“Hello? Hello? What do you want?” I said. “Sorry. What do you mean?”

There was a long pause. “Do you want to sex intercourse?” he repeated, this time more uncertainly.

“I’m so sorry, but I don’t understand,” I said.

After a few more tries, he gave up. An hour later, the phone rang again. He obviously had been consulting a dictionary. “I mean I love you,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” I said politely, before hanging up.

Part of me remained an unrepentant Maoist. When I had first arrived in 1972, everyone seemed proud to be Chinese. Women braided their hair. Men looked confident in Mao suits. But by 1988, China seemed to be having a national crisis of self-esteem. I hated seeing people ape Westerners. One of Beijing’s newest millionaires had grown rich peddling an expensive hair tonic he claimed could cure baldness. Many women, and even some men, permed their hair into a frizzy mass. They bought “skin-whitener” creams so they wouldn’t be mistaken for sunburned peasants. And everybody wanted to be taller. As a short person with straight hair who tanned easily, I felt quite offended.

Mao (himself five feet eleven inches) once disparagingly referred to Deng Xiaoping as “that stump.” Official photographs never showed the four-foot nine-inch leader standing shoulder to waist with other world figures. Then I discovered there were height requirements for teachers’ college (“The students at the back won’t be able to see you”) and for television cameramen (“You have to be able to film over other people’s heads”).

When, in 1993, the government inexplicably issued “standard” heights — five foot three for women, and five foot seven for men — I breathed a sigh of relief. I had just squeaked by. Then I was depressed to learn I had failed the minimum height requirement to waitress at the Beijing Hilton coffee shop. (Norman, at five feet eleven inches, was an inch too short to be a Hilton doorman.) Insecurity swept the vertically-challenged nation. Height-disadvantaged female peasants wore high heels to work in the fields. Young urban toughs tottered on stacked heels while they played pool. Anxious parents invested in “growth medicine” and “stretching machines” for their pipsqueak offspring.

I found myself missing the old blue-gray days. Only Deng still clung to Mao suits. Tourists raved about how well dressed everyone was now but, to me, the Chinese had no sense of Western style. They combined plaid with chintz, chartreuse with burgundy, and wore long underwear under pantyhose. PLA soldiers goose-stepped around in banana-republic uniforms encrusted with stars and cardboard epaulets. To prove their suits were store-bought, men never cut off the labels stitched to the cuffs, a fashion statement no sillier,
I suppose, than paying more for a shirt with a polo-player logo on the pocket.

Yan Yan, my perky news assistant, wore big earrings and tiny jeans. She pierced seven holes in one ear and once dyed a burgundy swath through her short-cropped hair. Occasionally, she bared her trim midriff, shocking the rest of the staff. Once when the two of us arrived at an airport in the provinces — she in a stonewashed denim miniskirt and I in my L.L Bean drab — the comrades assumed
she
was the running-dog reporter. They shook her hand, grabbed her suitcase and left me behind in the dust.

Yan Yan was the new wife of my old friend Julian Schuman, a China Hand from Brooklyn. At various times, Yan Yan had been a PLA soldier, a factory worker and a Communist Party member. The Party had expelled her a few years earlier for her wild lifestyle, and because she refused to snitch on an equally wild friend. She met Julian at
China Daily
, where she was a typist and he was polishing the sports page.
China Daily’s
own version of Cadre Huang had opposed the marriage, in part because Yan Yan was in her early thirties and Julian, who had lived in China on and off since the 1940s, was nearly seventy. Yan Yan, the cadre warned Julian, was a heartless gold-digger and a woman of loose morals. When Julian married her anyway,
China Daily
fired her. Their loss was my gain. She was brash, street-smart and enthusiastic.

As a foreign journalist, I was now officially one of the enemy, except that I still looked like one of the people. Like other reporters, diplomats and spy types, I had to live in special guarded compounds that were off-limits to ordinary Chinese. One day, as I strolled through a compound gate on my way to lunch at a Canadian diplomat’s apartment, the security guard snapped out of his noontime stupor.

“Where are
you
from?” he said.

“Canada,” I said, in Chinese, as I passed him.

He grabbed my arm. I shook him loose. He grabbed my other arm.

“I am Canadian,” I yelled, again in Chinese. As an afterthought, I screamed it in English, too. But the guard assumed I was a “fake foreign devil,” a Chinese putting on airs. I broke loose and ran across the parking lot. He was faster, and blocked my way. Unfortunately,
I happened to be suffering from a severe handicap. Not only had I put on an unaccustomed dress, but on my last home leave I had discovered Stay Puts (which came, like salted nuts, in a pop-top can). Invited to lunch with a diplomat, I decided the moment had come to try on my boobs-in-a-can.

The guard chased me around a Mercedes. I ducked behind a jeep. I wasn’t sure which worried me more: getting cattle-prodded at high noon or literally falling to pieces. Just then, the Canadian diplomat appeared. He had heard my screams six floors up. In fluent Chinese he informed the guard that he would be filing a formal complaint with the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “You see her?” he said, pointing to my face. “She’s Canadian. That’s what a Canadian looks like.”

It was invaluable, as a journalist in a totalitarian country, to look just like all the other second-class citizens. Sometimes, to fend off security guards, I even pretended I was mentally ill. One afternoon, a guard made a bee-line for me in an office lobby.

“Who are you seeing here?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” I told him politely.

“Well, what company are you going to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly, staring vacantly into space. He backed off.

Looking like a local also helped me avoid the Deng-era surcharges levied on foreigners for everything from park admission to a cup of coffee. At first I voluntarily paid more to expiate my thank-God-my-grandparents-left guilt feelings. Eventually, I resented economic apartheid and sneaked through as a Chinese whenever possible. But because I was forced to live in a foreigners-only compound, I had to pay more for phones, electricity, cooking gas and even a subscription to the
People’s Daily
. The final indignity came when I recycled my old newspapers. The scrap dealer paid less, pound for pound, for the
Globe
than for the
People’s Daily
.

I decided my first reporting trip should be to the countryside, where three out of four Chinese lived. The retired wife of Norman’s
former boss at the Institute of Computing Technology suggested I go to coastal Zhejiang province, to a village called Gaobei (North Marsh), so isolated that I would be the first foreigner ever to visit it. When she offered to go with me to help translate the local dialect, I grandly announced the
Globe
would pay her expenses.

I took 500 yuan, or about $100. In the old days, it would have been worth a small fortune. Alas, I underestimated the effect of inflation, which didn’t exist in the old centrally planned, fixed-price economy. In Shaoxing, the closest town with running water, I gulped when they quoted me the price of rooms in the foreigners’ wing. We settled for mildewed quarters in the Chinese wing. By the fourth day, we were reduced to eating Sichuan pickle soup and plain rice for dinner. I grew desperate as I watched my friend, a ninety-pound woman with a history of stomach ailments, waste away before my eyes. She was too polite to say what she really thought about expense accounts at Canadian newspapers, but she cabled her husband, who promptly wired us a pile of yuan.

The ancient town of Shaoxing was threaded with picturesque canals. Our hotel’s foundation was even submerged in one, which resulted in a great view, lots of mosquitoes, and a rainforest-like atmosphere in my bathroom. But after I tried the village privy at North Marsh, the centipedes and cracked tiles of my hotel bathroom seemed positively sybaritic. Nestled amidst mirror-like ponds and feathery groves of bamboo, North Marsh (population: 12,054) was so bucolic it didn’t have running water.

The first time – and last time – I used a North Marsh outhouse, I was attacked by a zillion flies and mosquitoes. For some reason, the filthy seats were unusually high. I couldn’t imagine how the average substandard Chinese female could hoist herself high enough to avoid brushing against it. When I opened the door and a shaft of sunlight shot in, I discovered white pin-like maggots crawling all over the place. My Chinese friend resolved not to drink anything after we left our hotel each morning.

Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms seemed to be working. North Marsh was so far off the beaten track that it had built its first road only a year earlier. Now it was planning to install traffic lights. In a few months, it would replace its two battery-run, hand-cranked
telephones with direct-dial ones. Seven factories had already sprung up along the road’s dusty edges, churning out everything from Dacron thread to diet pills to quartz crystals. I watched peasants in long denim aprons lifting brittle sheets of manganese out of acid baths. Another group stamped out plastic parts for television sets. The village now paid factory-level wages to a small group of peasants to handle all the farming.