Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (46 page)

P
ARADISE
R
EGAINED?

Housekeeper Ma with Ben, when he was seven months old
.

Nanny Ma with Sam, our second son, when he was one
.

Cook Mu made this cake for Ben’s first birthday
.
All photos: Jan Wong

A
fter witnessing so much death and destruction at Tiananmen, some might have concluded the world was too horrible for children. I felt the opposite. I had postponed children for my career, and I was now thirty-seven. I realized, when the dust settled, that I was lucky to be alive, and my first instinct was to bring new life into the world. But I was a bit taken aback when my doctor told me my due date was the first anniversary of the massacre.

In fact, Ben arrived two weeks early. At first, I planned to have him in China, and I went for check-ups at the special foreigners’ ward in the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital. “Your
gu pen
is too small,” the Chinese gynecologist said one day. She spoke fluent English but, like many Chinese who dealt with foreigners, insisted on speaking Chinese to me because I looked Chinese. Like the guard at the compound gate, she assumed I was a fake foreign devil putting on airs.

“My what?” I asked.

“Your
gu peni”
she snapped, reminding me of Fu the Enforcer.

I racked my brain. “What is a
gu pen,”
I finally asked.

“You’re having a
baby
and you don’t know what
zgu pen
is?” she sputtered. Shaking her head at my colossal ignorance, she disdainfully uttered the word in English:
pelvis
. That’s when I considered
going to Hong Kong. I wasn’t worried about my undersized pelvis. (It turned out to be normal sized, anyway.) I just didn’t want to be scolded for my vocabulary when I was in labor.

My resolve hardened when a Yugoslav journalist friend, Zorana Bakovic, told me that as she was rolled into the operating room for an emergency cesarean, the Chinese doctor asked, “Are you a Communist Party member?” Zorana panicked. She was, but couldn’t decide whether they’d treat her better or worse. It seemed that China deliberately made childbirth as unpleasant as possible. Perhaps it was a diabolical family-planning plot to ensure the memories were so bad you’d be put off having any more babies. Two women in labor, for instance, sometimes shared a single gurney, one’s head next to the other’s feet. And anesthetic was banned for all childbirth except cesarean sections.

Like many Chinese of the nineties, I saw no virtue in deprivation. I no longer had any desire to haul pig manure or overhaul my ideology. I lusted after creature comforts like anesthetic. So I decided to go to Hong Kong to have Ben.

I had originally gone to China to escape shopping malls. But like the other 1.2 billion Chinese, I found I now suffered from massive pent-up consumer desire. Living a thousand miles from the closest Toys “Я” Us made me, a first-time mother, nervous. I had no idea what babies needed. So, on a home leave just before Ben’s birth, I had cleverly bought everything: orthodontically correct pacifiers, teething rings, formula bottles, powdered formula, a baby-food processor, an electronic baby monitor, diaper safety pins, plain cloth diapers, two dozen ducky-printed flannel diapers with Velcro closures, a diaper-changing bag, plastic outer pants, diaper detergent, disinfectant and softener, paper diaper liners, diaper rash cream, baby sunscreen, shampoo, oil, cream and wipes, Q-Tips, infant Tylenol, three types of baby thermometers, five parenting books and baby manicure scissors. Oh yes, and baby clothes and shoes, baby blankets, stuffed animals, baby books, a crib mobile, a crib bumper, baby back and arm carriers, a portable crib, a high chair, a Jolly Jumper, two strollers and a safety-tested car seat.

“Boy, are you ever insecure,” my mother said as she watched me trying to jam everything into my suitcase in Montreal. Back in
Beijing, our nanny, Ma Naiying, watched me unpack. “I thought foreign countries had disposable diapers,” she said suspiciously. They did, I admitted. But I figured that, with all my household help, I could be environmentally virtuous without having to wash a single diaper myself. Nanny Ma soon set me straight.

“These will get really stiff and uncomfortable, and take hours to dry,” she said, poking suspiciously at the very expensive ducky-printed, Velcro-closing cloth diapers I had just carried across the Pacific. “Why don’t you use disposable ones.” It was a command, not a question. The problem was, I could barely carry in the basic equipment, never mind thousands of disposable diapers. And China didn’t make diapers, disposable or otherwise. At the fancy Palace Hotel drugstore, imported Pampers sold for the equivalent of a dollar apiece. At that rate, I calculated Ben would be going through $4,000 worth a year.

As a compromise, Nanny Ma suggested we
ba
Ben.
Ba
meant to hold a baby gently by the hips over a potty or by the edge of the road and whistle softly to imitate the tinkle of urine. Chinese babies and toddlers didn’t wear diapers at all, not even cloth ones. Instead, they always wore
kai dang ku
, literally open-crotch pants. Cotton, water and soap were all scarce items. People weren’t. Someone was always available to
ba
a Chinese baby.

Parents began to
ba
as early as one month. Incredibly, most babies were toilet-trained by six months — at least during waking hours. By the time they could walk, usually at twelve to fourteen months, they knew to squat down in their open-crotch pants whenever they felt the urge. In winter, their tiny bums were as rosy as their other cheeks. Cathy McGregor, an American trying to toilet train her own daughter, watched in amazement once as teachers prepared fifteen toddlers for a turn on the trampoline in a Beijing park.

“The teachers went around and said,”
‘Niao, niao, niao’
— ‘Pee, pee, pee,’ ” said Cathy. “I thought, how could they all have to go at the same time? But they all squatted down.”

Still, the system had its drawbacks. Older children, even ten-year-olds, had to be woken every four hours at night, or they would wet their beds. Nanny Ma was confident she could
ba
Ben. Having read the five parenting books, I mumbled something incoherent about
the emotional scarring of over-early toilet training. I didn’t tell her Norman and I were lousy whistlers and that we dreaded waking Ben twice each night until he went to college. Notwithstanding my huge investment, it did occur to me that cloth diapers
were
silly. After all, who used cloth toilet paper? So Nanny Ma and I agreed on disposable diapers, meaning that I agreed to import thousands of them.

Outsiders were always impressed that I could have a baby and work as a foreign correspondent. They didn’t realize that in grand
Globe
tradition, I had a cook, a driver, a housekeeper, a news assistant and a nanny. As an ex-Maoist, though, I felt awkward having people wait on me hand and foot. At first, Driver Liu tried to open the car door for me chauffeur-style, until I set him straight. And unlike some foreigners, I refused to sit in the back seat — the battered Globemobile wasn’t a limousine, after all. At mealtimes, I found it discomfiting to be served. Before Norman arrived, I ate in solitary splendor in the
Globe’s
large dining room while the cook hovered in the kitchen. Just like the old days at Beijing University, I tried to help clean up afterwards.

For their part, the Chinese staff had never worked for anyone who spoke their language, in more ways than one. I knew, for instance, all the words to that Cultural Revolution ditty “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman.” It made us closer that I, like them, had once been a Maoist who had worked in the paddy fields. They always enjoyed it when a stranger dropped by the bureau and couldn’t figure out which one of us was the foreign correspondent.

My colleagues at home were understandably envious when they heard about the bureau set-up. Some even started taking Chinese lessons. What they didn’t realize was that my staff belonged to a powerful union I dubbed Workers of the World United. If I “fired” one of the staff, they returned to the Diplomatic Service Bureau, a wing of the Foreign Ministry, where they simply waited for another assignment. Short of a brush with the law, they had “iron rice bowls,” a guaranteed job for life.

Besides their regular duties, the staff was supposed to spy on us. That was easy because emptying the trash and hanging around were
in their job description. In addition to regular tattle meetings, the staff also had to attend special brainwashing sessions because working for Westerners was likened to working in a “vat of dye”; they had to cleanse themselves of the stain of foreign contact. For this, the Diplomatic Service Bureau charged us ten times the market rate and skimmed off most of the money for itself.

But especially after Tiananmen, morale was so bad that people openly balked at going to these meetings. To boost attendance, the Diplomatic Service resorted to giving out door prizes of enamel pots and frozen carp. By the 1990s, about all that remained of the old system was a set of forty-two secret rules, which covered everything from receiving foreigners in your home (absolutely banned) to receiving gifts from foreigners (absolutely banned).

It was poetic justice that an ex-Maoist like me be condemned to manage four Commie servants. I paid their salaries, and they bossed me around. On Monday mornings, Nanny Ma clucked her tongue if she found even a hint of rash on Ben’s behind.

“You didn’t change his diaper fast enough,” she scolded.

“I’m really sorry,” I apologized. “I’ll try not to let it happen again.”

When Ben went through his terrible twos and refused to eat a perfectly delicious meal, I tried to impose a modicum of discipline. “Fine. Starve,” I said. At the first sign of tears, Cook Mu would sweep Ben up in his arms, take him into the kitchen and share his bowl of food with him. I never gave away my old Cultural Revolution clothes to the staff, in mistress-of-the-manor fashion. Instead, Nanny Ma, who preferred silk, gave me
her
hand-me-downs.

We lived in a brand-new diplomatic compound of an architectural style best described as Post-Stalinist Instant Decrepitude. Pagoda Garden, as our dreary cluster of concrete highrises was called, didn’t have a pagoda or, at first, even a garden. For the first three years, our front yard was an expanse of mud studded with the occasional dead rat. Our backyard was the midnight gravel dump for the new Canadian Embassy, which, like the rest of Beijing, seemed to be endlessly under construction.