Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (52 page)

Except for some fine lines around her eyes and mouth, she was unchanged. At fifty-one, she looked like a petite Chinese version of Audrey Hepburn. She was still a fragile beauty, tiny-waisted in an olive silk blouse and mid-calf beige skirt, her hair swept back in an elegant chignon of black silk. Center didn’t realize that I now knew about her and Mao.

After half an hour of chitchat, I broached the subject. “Why were you and Pearl the only ones from our class selected to attend his funeral? And why were you two the only ones from Beijing University to help build his mausoleum?”

Center stiffened and blushed. Her husband, a former baritone, stared off into space. “We represented the whole history department at Beijing University,” she said in a flat voice, her tone closing off that avenue of discussion. It was too late. Now I couldn’t tell her I knew, after pretending I didn’t. We went downstairs for dinner. As the waitress poured us Cokes, I edged toward the topic one last time. Had Center ever visited the Mao Mausoleum? I asked.

“No,” she said. “I never have time. On business trips, I’m always so rushed.”

In 1988, when I first returned to China, I avoided Cadre Huang and Teacher Fu. I knew my status as a reporter would only make them nervous, and I wasn’t dying to have my tones corrected. After the Tiananmen Massacre, when half a dozen of its students had made the Most Wanted list, my alma mater was even more phobic about foreign journalists. On sensitive political anniversaries, plainclothes
police patrolled the campus while armed soldiers and more police ringed the perimeter.

I knew that Beijing University had changed over the years. It now taught such bourgeois subjects as sociology, psychology and even women’s studies. Nobody did hard labor any more. And students no longer vied to eat steamed sawdust. In 1994, when I knew I would be leaving China, curiosity got the better of me. Had Fu the Enforcer mellowed? What had happened to Party Secretary Pan? Chancellor Zhou? I phoned Cadre Huang.

“It’s Bright Precious Wong,” I said.

“Aiya! Why do you never call? Why do you never come to visit?” he shouted, even though the new imported phone lines were crystal clear.

“As a matter of fact, I thought I’d drop by to see you. How about tomorrow?”

I heard a strangled giggle over the phone. The next day he was waiting in his office dressed in a Western suit and red tie. He was a mere four years away from retirement, but his hair was still coal black, and he still had an unruly cowlick. His narrow face, sharp chin, piercing eyes and sallow complexion hadn’t changed at all. At fifty-six, he was now chief of the Foreign Students Office, in charge of more than fifteen hundred students in six buildings.

“So sudden,” he said apologetically. “No one is around.” Fu had just left for a three-month teaching job in France. Dai was in Japan, also teaching. Party Secretary Pan had gone to the airport to meet a foreign delegation. And Chancellor Zhou had recently died, at the age of ninety-one. I told Huang that Fat Paycheck Shulman and I now had two little boys. He laughed his embarrassed whinny, putting his hand up to shield his mouth.

“I can’t
believe
the stupid things I did,” he said. He squinted at me. “I can hardly remember. Let’s see. Did your father tell us to try to stop it?” I shook my head, and said nothing.

“I remember we had a big fight. You were very upset. I was very sad,” he said with another humorless laugh. He repeated this twice more, as if trying to convince himself. I changed the subject. I knew that my alma mater had recently banned kissing.

“How are things at Beijing University?” I asked.

“No time to play ping-pong,” he said, with another giggle. “And no one has a Chinese roommate any more.”

I suddenly felt nostalgic about wheat harvests. “Is there any more open-door schooling?”

He burst out laughing. “Now foreign students want comfort. Factories want to make money. It’s not like before.”

I felt a bit sad. As difficult and crazy as my years at Beijing University had been, I had had a unique experience. Now, the students coming after me were having such a conventional time they might as well have been studying in Singapore or Taipei or Hong Kong.

“Before you leave, we’ll get everybody together,” said Cadre Huang. “And you must bring Fat Paycheck Shulman.”

We waited and waited for Fu the Enforcer to return from Paris, but she kept extending her stay. She was now a good three months past her scheduled return date. I would be leaving China in two weeks, and we could wait no longer. Cadre Huang scheduled a farewell banquet at the campus restaurant. When I arrived, I couldn’t resist asking, “So, has Teacher Fu defected?” Cadre Huang burst into nervous laughter. For a moment, I thought she had, but he assured me she would return any day now.

He had invited Erica’s old roommate, now a professor in the Chinese department, Teacher Dai, who was just back from Japan, and Party Secretary Pan. I knew it was my last chance to ask Pan why he had never passed on my wedding invitation, but I decided that he no longer deserved to be embarrassed. My classmates told me that in 1989 he had marched to Tiananmen Square and had even encouraged foreign students to join the protests. The university had punished him with a demotion, which is why he now spent his days hanging around airport waiting rooms. If Lacking Virtue Pan could change, anybody could.

The food was far better than in the 1970s. We had a dozen cold appetizers: dark, woodsy Chinese mushrooms, paper-thin slices of smoked pork, chicken with crushed chilies and Sichuan peppercorns, and slivered, blanched green peppers tossed in sesame oil. A parade of hot dishes followed: wok-fried jumbo shrimp and broccoli, steamed whole fish, spicy squid with crackling rice, a soothing crab and corn chowder and numerous varieties of savory
dumplings. The sweet cassia wine loosened people’s tongues. Cadre Huang, who was sitting on my left, turned to me.

“We used to recall the bitterness of the past to savor the sweetness of the present,” he said, swallowing a mouthful of shrimp. “Well, now when we talk about recalling bitterness, we don’t mean before Liberation. We mean the 1970s. Do you recall I was so poor I didn’t even own a watch when you first knew me?”

I didn’t. Back then nobody ever hinted life was hard. But I did remember the day he accidentally threw out a month’s worth of his family’s rice ration coupons. “You turned white,” I said. “But all the teachers shared theirs with you, and you were able to get through the month.”

Inevitably, the talk turned to the massacre. Every conversation did, even five years later. Cadre Huang repeated the government line. “No one died in Tiananmen Square,” he said. I refused to rise to the bait. Why get emotional? I now understood he was just another Party hack doing his job. Still, I had to say something. In an even voice I told him I had been there that night and had seen the army shoot into the crowds over and over again. There was an awkward silence. Party Secretary Pan stared at his plate. Teacher Dai and Erica’s roommate giggled uncomfortably.

Did they have any news from Erica? I asked. I hadn’t seen her since we parted in 1973, twenty-one years earlier. Cadre Huang told me she had returned twice after earning a Ph.D. in mathematics in the States. “She’s upset with how Beijing University has changed. She misses the old days.” He laughed his humorless whinny. “We stuffed you two full of revolutionary thinking. Her problem is that she left too soon. She never experienced what happened after.”

He stopped and cleared his throat. He looked at a spot on the wall above my head. In a low voice he said that thirty-six university students had been killed at Tiananmen Square. “Three were from Beijing University.”

I nodded expressionlessly. Anything more would have embarrassed him. But for a fleeting moment, I wanted to hug him. Even Cadre Huang had changed.

The fact that I now had two sons made a deep impression on Cadre Huang. In urban China, almost no Chinese my age had more than
one child — unless they were lucky enough to have twins. I felt guilty whenever I walked down the street pushing Sam in a stroller with Ben toddling beside. “Look, she has
two
children,” people would whisper, nudging one another. “Two
sons!”

As I pondered China’s future for my final dispatches, I began to think about the long-term repercussions of Beijing’s one-child policy. In rural areas, where three out of four Chinese lived, many families had several children. But in the cities, where the one-child policy was strictly enforced, millions of onlies were growing up sibling-free, doted on by two parents and four grandparents. I saw six-year-olds still spoon-fed, ten-year-olds who couldn’t dress themselves. In a Beijing department store, my sister witnessed a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. “The parents and the grandparents were all crowding around, trying to get him to stop crying. They kept offering him toys, and he kept screaming louder. Finally, the father pulled out a pack of cigarettes and gave him one.”

Many parents of the nineties were part of the Lost Generation of the Cultural Revolution. After suffering so much themselves, they were determined not to deprive their only child. Beijing’s biggest toy store was always jammed with parents buying toddler-sized fake fur coats, imported baby shampoo and red Porsche pedal cars. “My wife squanders her entire salary buying things for our son. She spends 50 yuan” — $6 — “on a shirt for him. For a
kid!”
complained Driver Liu, who usually spent one-fifth that amount on a shirt for himself. “She has to get him a famous brand name. Ordinary clothes won’t do. When they go out, they always go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then they’re so tired they take a
taxi
home!” he sputtered.

Nanny Ma always saved the choicest fruit for
her
only son. When he was a teenager, he still took the best for himself and said, in all seriousness, “But, Mom, you
like
bruised fruit.” As he was growing up, she never let anyone, not even her husband, reprimand him. At sixteen, when her son was addicted to video games, she wanted him to eat some juicy grapes but didn’t want to interrupt him or get his fingers sticky So she peeled him one and popped it into his mouth. Then another, and another. He glared at her. “Not so fast,” he snapped. “Can’t you see I have to spit out the seeds?” By the time he was in his early twenties, her son refused to make his bed. He always left a scrap of food on the plate so he could stick it back in
the refrigerator unwashed. When he began bringing his girlfriend home for the night, Nanny Ma finally put her foot down. That’s when he pulled a knife on her.

Many people thought that a country populated with Little Emperors was headed for disaster. I disagreed. Granted, it might be unpleasant to live in a nation of me-first onlies, yet I saw a social revolution in the making. For generations, Chinese society had emphasized the family, the clan, the collective over the individual. Now, for the first time in four thousand years of history, the relationship was reversed. Pampered onlies were growing up to be self-centered, strong-willed, knife-wielding individualists like, well, Americans. Where the Mao generation failed, the Me generation just might succeed. “It’s China’s salvation,” said Michael Crook, a British friend who was born and raised in Beijing. “If you have a population of Little Emperors, you can’t have little slaves. Everyone will want to tell everyone else what to do. You’ll have
democracy!”

In the late 1980s, a team of Chinese psychologists conducted a study of the only child with the help of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a Harvard pediatrician and chief of the child development unit at Boston Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Researchers picked 360 children, half with siblings, half without, and asked them to rate each other. Factors such as age, income and rural or urban backgrounds didn’t affect the outcome. Onlies did whatever best served their own interests. None voluntarily shared toys.

“Their peers always rated them as more selfish, less modest and less helpful in group activities,” said Dr. Brazelton. The study’s results boded ill for the collectivism espoused by the Chinese Communist Party. At a meeting to discuss the results, Dr. Brazelton found himself sitting next to the wife of Premier Li Peng. She turned to him and said with a frown, “This will never work for communism, will it?”

After Tiananmen, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the intriguing question was how long Chinese communism would last. And many Chinese also wondered how long Deng Xiaoping himself would endure. His health, of course, was a state secret. The official word was always that he was just fine. His eldest son even told reporters that Deng watched fifty of the
fifty-two televised soccer matches during the 1990 World Cup.

But Deng rarely left his gray brick residence at Rice Granary Alley in the heart of Beijing. Although he had quit smoking his favorite Panda cigarettes, he was still said to play his beloved bridge every day. By 1994, his eyesight had failed and others had to read to him. By then, he had retired from all his positions except honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association. Despite his poor health and the lack of any formal post, Deng continued to wield supreme power. To honor him, the Party struck an 18-karat gold-plated medallion in his likeness and inscribed it with a new title, the Great Architect.

On February 19, 1997, Deng Xiaoping died of advanced Parkinson’s disease in a military hospital in Beijing. He was 92, and hadn’t been seen publicly for three years. The Communist Party announced his death four hours later, in the middle of the night, so that people heard as they awoke the next day. Across the country, flags flew at half-mast. But except for loud sobs captured on state television, most citizens went about their business as usual. On the fifth day, Deng’s body was cremated, and on the sixth, soldiers sealed off Tiananmen Square during the funeral service in the Great Hall of the People. No foreigners were allowed to attend.

So much had changed after the Great Helmsman’s death in 1976. What would happen now that the Great Architect had passed away? Deng had sown the seeds of instability by creating a Communist-capitalist hybrid. Many Chinese fervently hoped the country would remain stable, but the new emphasis on profits was setting off an explosive reaction. As money-losing industries went bust, restive state workers were learning they had nothing to lose but their chains. Everyone knew Deng had failed to anoint a true successor. Few people were willing to bet that either Party Chief Jiang Zemin, a grinning yes-man appointed after Tiananmen, or Premier Li Peng, who had a reputation for stupidity and cruelty, could retain power.