Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (6 page)

In 1937, during the Japanese invasion, my father, then seventeen, returned to Canada alone. His younger brother Gordon had died several years earlier of dropsy at age eight. Ma Shee, who couldn’t obtain a visa, stayed behind with John, the youngest, who was twelve. When the Canadian Pacific steamship from Hong Kong to Vancouver docked in Yokohama, a Japanese doctor boarded the ship. “You,” he barked at my father, the only young Chinese male on board. “You’re sick. You get off the ship here.” With Japan and China at war, the order meant certain prison camp, and probable death. The Canadian ship doctor intervened. “He’s not sick, just malnourished. He stays.” My father sailed on.

After eight years in Taishan, my father had forgotten all his English. In Vancouver, he flubbed a question about his birthdate, but was able to produce his Canadian birth certificate. He found his father still working in a grocery store in Montreal, still unable to support his family. In 1945, Ark Wong died of a heart attack in the hallway of an illegal Chinatown gambling parlor where he was moonlighting as a guard. He had not seen his wife or youngest son in the sixteen years since he had left them in Taishan.

“My big regret was that my father did not see me graduate,” said my father, who put himself through engineering at McGill. “I was the first person in my village to graduate from university.” In Montreal, my father toyed with the idea of returning to help rebuild China, but changed his mind after the Communists won. Instead, he guessed that Canadians would like fried rice and egg rolls, opened the first Chinese restaurant outside Montreal’s Chinatown and made his first million by the time he was forty.

My sister, my two brothers and I grew up speaking English and learning French. My tenuous links with the old country consisted of the Taishan chefs my father hired in his restaurants and Chinese
classical dance, where I learned to whip silk ribbons in the air and jingle tea cups while taking mincing “cloud steps.” My mother provided the only other exotic touch; when we misbehaved, she whacked us with chopsticks.

Our quiet street, Rosedale Avenue, was otherwise entirely Jewish. We lived between the Gersovitches and the Shaare Zedek Synagogue. Impressed with the synagogue school’s rigorous academic standards, my father tried to enroll us there – until the principal politely informed him you had to be Jewish. Instead, my siblings went to elite private schools, my sister to Miss Edgar’s & Miss Cramp’s, my brothers to Lower Canada College. I alone opted for public school. I had no desire, I told my father, to hang out with rich kids.

While my playmates on Rosedale Avenue learned Hebrew, I suffered through weekly lessons in Cantonese, the dialect of the Pearl River delta. In 1950, two years before I was born, my father brought Ma Shee back to Montreal. We saw her on weekends, but I never learned enough Cantonese to speak to her. All I remember was a silent old woman with gold earrings and gray hair knotted in a bun. Every Christmas, she bought two toy guns for my brothers and two dolls for my sister and me, even when I was too old to play with them. Ma Shee died in 1963, when I was eleven.

After two weeks in Taishan, I returned to Canton. Bai had decided the deaf-and-dumb approach to revolutionary tourism wasn’t working and had signed us both up with a group of ten American students. They were mostly from Berkeley and, like me, were budding ethnic Chinese Maoists in search of their roots. They also spoke no Mandarin but, unlike me, they had been allocated an interpreter who wasn’t seventy years old.

We hit all the revolutionary hot spots. In Shaoshan, China’s Graceland, we gazed reverently at Mao’s scarred kitchen table, the tiny vegetable patch he once weeded and the trapdoor to the attic where he conducted subversive meetings. In Dazhai, the Disneyland of Maoist agriculture, we spent three days peering into cooking pots, trampling the maize crop and attending
yi ku si tian
, or remem-bering-the-bitterness-of-the-past-to-savor-the-sweetness-of-the
present lectures. One evening an old peasant told us a harrowing tale of how the local landlord had killed his father and raped his mother. He started crying, and pretty soon we were all sobbing so loudly no one could hear. Somehow, he recovered, so we quieted down, and he told us how wonderful life was now under Chairman Mao. Only later, after I had lived in China for a year and had attended a dozen such lectures, did I realize he had to cry on cue several times a week.

Propaganda was the sacred duty of Dazhai’s peasants. The village was on the revolutionary tourism circuit not because it was scenic or historic but because Mao had chosen it as the national model of agricultural development. At its peak, twenty thousand visitors a day came to ogle the eighty-three families who lived in yellow loess caves dug out of the barren mountains of Shanxi province. Practicing collectivism and self-reliance, Dazhai’s peasants had reshaped their accursed land of dried gullies and steep hills into neatly terraced fields. To accommodate all the tourists, the state built an auditorium, a block-long dining hall and a hotel with real plumbing. As Mao’s chosen ones, its peasants traveled all over China giving testimonials. Although the village was battling a five-month drought that summer, the peasants never lost their photogenic smiles.

Chen Yonggui, Dazhai’s Communist Party secretary, was one of Mao’s homespun heroes. The son of beggars, Chen joined the Politburo and became a vice-premier during the Cultural Revolution. A prolific author who didn’t learn to read until he was forty-three, he composed articles with catchy titles like “Study and Creatively Use Mao Zedong Thought to Achieve a Bumper Harvest,” which became required reading across China. Everyone, from steelworkers to intellectuals, was supposed to adopt the terraced-field approach to daily life.

Chen Yonggui received us on our last day. With his trademark white terrycloth turban and week-old stubble, he looked like an amiable Chinese Yasser Arafat. While he droned on about Maoist agriculture, I watched as he literally chain-smoked. To consume every bit of tobacco, he would fit a fresh cigarette into the unfiltered smoldering butt of the old one. Rumor had it he used one match a day.

After Mao’s death in 1976, critics charged that Dazhai’s production figures were faked and accused the model commune of receiving millions of yuan in state aid. Chen himself was purged in 1980 and died several years later of lung cancer. After his death, loyal friends would light a cigarette in his honor and implant it, like a stick of incense, in front of his grave.

Our revolutionary tour seemed designed to prove that socialism was superior to capitalism, something we already believed anyway. One steamy July afternoon in northeast China, our guides announced we would watch workers repair 220,000-volt wires without shutting off the power. That seemed to surpass walking on hot coals for the revolution. As an emcee excitedly announced a young woman’s name and age over the loudspeaker, she climbed nimbly up a rope ladder suspended from the wire. Sparks crackled as she approached the electrical field. I held my breath as she reached the wire and began to repair it. We all clapped wildly and snapped pictures.

“We were scared at the beginning,” the young woman said later, as I eagerly jotted down her words in my notebook. “But we slowly are tempering ourselves.” There were three more like her, all fresh-faced and earnest, in Mao caps and denim work suits. Another spoke up. “Before when there was something wrong, we had to cut the power,” she said. “But after thoroughly studying Mao Zedong Thought, we were able to make technical innovations.” We were all duly impressed. Years later, I found out that what they did was a standard technique in the West. As long as they used a ladder that didn’t conduct electricity, the women were fine, just as birds and squirrels can land on high-voltage wires without getting fried.

The Chinese were always searching for ways to impress gullible foreigners. They claimed that acupuncture, the ancient practice of inserting needles into various points of the body, could treat everything from paralysis to mental illness. Patients looked like voodoo dolls, but many swore by its results. I tried it for colds, and it seemed to work, but who really knew?

Acupuncture anesthesia was an innovation of the Cultural Revolution. In one city, we watched doctors precede a cesarean section by inserting long thin needles into the patient’s ankles and
swollen belly. As the patient waved and smiled to us up in the observation dome, the surgeon sliced her open. The woman showed no reaction, although some in my group nearly lost their lunch. It seemed miraculous when the doctors lifted out a baby girl, all wet and blue, from the red sludge below. We watched as doctors sewed the woman up. “I felt nothing at all,” the patient said afterwards. “Acupuncture anesthesia is marvelous.” Despite success stories like this, acupuncture anesthesia was in fact unreliable, and was largely abandoned by the 1990s.

After several weeks, the non-stop rhetoric wore down even wannabe Maoists like us. The only acceptable way to let off steam in China was to roll stones up a hill, Sisyphean-style, when what we really needed was a Rolling Stones concert. When a guide droned on too long about how many slave days it took to construct the subterranean Ming Tombs in Beijing, I started tap-dancing on the marble floor, until Bai gave me the evil eye. Another time at dinner, someone in my tour group began parodying an acupuncture operation. We all joined in. Chopsticks twirled as mock needles over someone’s stomach. Leftover buns became tumors. The skit soon deteriorated into an all-American food fight — in a country where people had died of starvation not so long before. Our guides sat on the sidelines and looked grim.

Because I had studied a little Mandarin, I was often designated the official thanker. Each time I got up to make a speech at the end of a visit, the Chinese beamed expectantly. Their smiles faded when they couldn’t understand a word. After several excruciating performances, I began to lobby for a chance to study Chinese. Bai told me most colleges were mothballed because of the Cultural Revolution, and assured me no one in China was interested in tutoring for money. Undeterred, I pestered officials and bureaucrats in every city. On July 18, 1972, Bai took me aside in Beijing and whispered that I had been granted permission to study. She wouldn’t say what school I would attend, when I would start or what it would cost, but if I accepted, I would have to drop out of my tour group at once. I asked for ten minutes, walked once around the block, took a deep breath, and said yes.

Hamming it up with Erica Jen, right, at the Forbidden City
.

My first roommate, Scarlet Zhang
.

A
fter a week of suspense, an official told me I would begin studying at Beijing University in early August. I was thrilled and a bit in awe to learn that an American named Erica Jen and I would be the first students from the Western world to study in China since the Cultural Revolution. Although my visa was good for only three months, it appeared there would be no problem extending it for a year. With a few weeks to kill, I explored the capital. Almost every tourist attraction was closed, including the Fine Arts Museum, the imposing Beijing Library and the Temple to Confucius. At the Summer Palace, one of the few sites still open, Red Guards had daubed whitewash over thousands of decadent floral murals.

For the first time in years, I felt safe walking the streets alone. Dark shadows didn’t scare me, the way they did at home. I never had to look behind me or quicken my pace. I knew no one would leap out at me and conk me on the head. China had no pickpockets, no muggers, no rapists. I was in paradise, and I was secure. Or so I believed.

Desperate for something to read, I browsed through the New China Bookstore, a Chinese Barnes & Noble, except it was a state monopoly with only one bestseller, the
Selected Works
of Mao Zedong, available in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, English, French,
Spanish, German and Esperanto and in several editions, from proletarian to deluxe. I chose a hardcover set in faux leather. When I wearied of reading Mao’s “A Comment on the Sessions of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee and of the People’s Political Council Sessions,” I read an authorized biography of Kim Il-sung, the Great and Dear Leader of North Korea.