Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (7 page)

To prevent breakage and shoplifting, and to keep surly people fully employed, all goods, including books, soap and socks, were kept behind counters policed by nasty salesclerks. I watched as the masses beseeched them to pass over items, then quivered with indecision until the clerks snatched them back and barked at the customers to make up their minds. While I was delighted to see that no makeup or hair curlers were for sale, I was less thrilled to learn there were no tampons. Chinese women folded coarse gray toilet paper into rubberized belt-like holders. A six-cent roll came studded with fragments of still-legible recycled newsprint, which also neatly solved the problem of reading matter in the bathroom.

The Cultural Revolution had trashed both quality and taste. The quality of china — in the country that invented it — was so bad that salesclerks tapped each porcelain bowl with a spoon to check for an off-tone indicating a flaw. Silk, another Chinese invention, came in hideous prints. I bought a garish blouse just so I could defy anyone to name a color it didn’t have. No one ever could. I later learned that Finnish diplomats piled all their official gifts in a room at the embassy they dubbed the “chamber of horrors.”

I toured the city by randomly hopping trolleys and buses. When I tried to buy a bicycle at an ordinary store, I discovered I needed special ration coupons. Although it offended my Maoist sensibilities, I had no choice but to buy one at the Friendship Store, an Orwellian-named shop that barred Chinese and catered to foreigners – and sold them bikes, rice, oil and other rationed items without requiring coupons. I began noticing that in China some people were more equal than others. The masses squeezed onto wheezing trolleys; meanwhile, top officials glided around in gleaming Red Flag limousines (which were black, not red), shielded from curious eyes by shirred taupe gauze curtains.

Food stores were sparse and the lineups long. Produce was
strictly seasonal. At one time, the only fruit available was soft yellow apples, too sweet and mushy to my taste, but beloved by the Chinese. Then the apples disappeared. When the first perfumed peaches, golden pink and fuzzy on the outside, white as jade on the inside, came on the market, people greedily filled their net bags with them.

I noted in my journal that the skies were a startling azure, but it didn’t occur to me that the lack of pollution was due to lagging industrial production. As I biked down car-free streets, I thought happily that China had chosen the right path for development. I didn’t think about how the very old, the very young, the handicapped, the sick, not to mention entire families, got around the vast city. Everyone glowed with health. China resembled a Colorado health spa. There was the same low-cholesterol vegetarian diet, known as meat rationing. There was the same early-to-bed regimen, known as power outages. And instead of working out with a personal trainer, the Chinese just plain worked. The only difference was you could never check out.

On August 8, 1972, a Soviet-made car picked me up at my hotel and headed for the university area in the northwest. Of the dozens of institutes clustered here — aeronautics, politics, law, forestry, agriculture, foreign languages, rocketry, Communist Party history, electronics, diplomacy, pedagogy, telecommunications, national minority cultures and spying – only Beijing University and Qinghua University had reopened. They were China’s two top universities, its Oxford and Cambridge, its Harvard and MIT. The campuses were side by side in the loveliest, coolest part of Beijing. Qinghua focused on applied sciences and turned out the country’s technocrats and engineers. Beijing University specialized in basic sciences and liberal arts and was favored by the elite. It was where Mao Zedong once worked as a librarian, Deng’s third wife studied physics and both families had sent their children.

Over the years, Beijing University produced a disproportionate share of China’s troublemakers. In 1919, its students led the May 4th Movement, demonstrating in Tiananmen Square for democracy. In 1966, Red Guards at Beijing University took the lead in denouncing
Deng Xiaoping as a “capitalist roader.” They incarcerated his eldest son, a Beijing University physics student, who jumped from a fourth-floor dormitory window and ended up paralyzed from the waist down. In 1989, Beijing University students would again take the lead in organizing pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. How could Deng not remember, when he gave the order to fire, what the earlier group of rebels had done to his son?

I knew very little about Beijing University’s turbulent history when my car entered the white granite gates of the campus and stopped in front of the antiseptically named Building Twenty-five. Two teachers in Mao suits, their hair neatly combed into long braids, rushed out. One grabbed my suitcase. The other took me by the hand and led me to the third floor, where an honor guard of a dozen young women waited in the hall. I grinned self-consciously. They smiled back and said in English, “Welcome you!” a literal translation of the standard Chinese greeting,
huanying nil
At room 330, a young woman with impossibly thick braids and a shy smile stepped forward. She was my new roommate, Zhang Hong (Scarlet Zhang).

The school had briefed her on the Western habit of handshaking, but had apparently neglected to tell her how long it should last. She grabbed my left hand and shook and shook and shook and shook. When I tried to shake loose, she interpreted that as enthusiasm and renewed her handshaking with vigor. If I was taken aback at holding hands with my new roommate, she was equally surprised with me. “I was expecting someone with blue eyes and blond hair,” she told me later. “You looked like a Chinese, but you didn’t speak any Chinese.”

Like me, Scarlet was nineteen. She was a head taller than I and serious-faced, with a tendency to furrow her thick brows whenever she was perplexed. She was also voluptuous, and slouched self-consciously most of the time — the Cultural Revolution was not the best time in Chinese history to look sexy. “Welcome you!” used up one-third of her English vocabulary. She knew four other words: “Long live Chairman Mao!” Scarlet was a world history major, chosen to match my major at McGill. In fact, the entire female section of her class had been moved into Building Twenty-five to keep me company. Erica Jen, who arrived the same day, got the entire female section of the freshman Chinese linguistics class.

Although I didn’t know it until later, the decision to accept the first two students from the wicked West had been made by Premier Zhou Enlai himself. In hindsight, we were a logical sequel to the Nixon visit. If China was planning to resume student exchanges in a year, what better, safer way to start than with a couple of friendly Overseas Chinese? Erica and I both thought the Cultural Revolution was wonderful. And we were willing and eager to spend a year subjecting ourselves to virtually anything the Chinese threw our way.

Erica, a math major at Yale, was the daughter of C.K. Jen, a Chinese-born physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Beijing, then locked in a struggle with Taipei for international recognition, loved him because he had just given the regime tremendous face by leading a delegation of eminent Chinese-American scientists to China. When Dr. Jen asked if his daughter could study at Beijing University, Premier Zhou himself okayed the request. It helped that Dr. Jen’s roommate in the 1920s at the California Institute of Technology was now chancellor of Beijing University.

The Chinese must have figured I was the perfect companion for Erica. I was the same age, sex and ethnicity, and was eager to learn Chinese. Better yet, I wasn’t from the U.S., with whom Beijing didn’t even have diplomatic relations. Among Western nations, Canada was considered less disgusting than former imperialist powers like Britain and France. Canada had never invaded China. It was one of the earlier Western nations to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing, in 1970. And Ottawa had backed Beijing’s bid to oust Taiwan and reclaim its United Nations seat. Canada also supplied China’s only authentic Western martyr, Dr. Norman Bethune, a swashbuckling surgeon who died in 1939 while caring for wounded Chinese Communist soldiers.

Besides, I seemed a good bet: a stark, raving Maoist.

In an earlier incarnation, the campus had been an imperial preserve of He Shen, a corrupt eighteenth-century Manchu prince. In the 1920s, American missionaries transformed the site into Yenching University, which specialized in journalism and sociology. After the
Communist victory in 1949, Beijing University, founded at the turn of the century, expropriated the campus. During the noon siesta that fall, when the hum of cicadas was so loud it blanketed the city in white noise, I would cycle on the curved paths, past marble tortoises as big as hot tubs, ponds of pink lotuses and Ming-style buildings with red lacquered pillars and spectacular curved roofs. I could read undisturbed beneath the weeping willows that rimmed No Name Lake, and look across at the graceful pagoda that doubled as a water tower. Farther north, beyond the campus boundaries, were the ruins of the Garden of Perfect Brightness, a pleasure ground of the Summer Palace that once eclipsed Versailles in scale and grandeur.

In 1972, the campus was virtually deserted. Scarlet’s class, the second batch to arrive since the Cultural Revolution began, brought the student body to a few hundred, compared with a normal enrollment often thousand. Many buildings were padlocked. Lecture halls were empty. Until we arrived, Building Twenty-five, a gray brick structure with a curved-tile roof, had been vacant for six years.

The small room I shared with Scarlet was luxurious compared with ordinary Chinese dorms, where students slept eight to a room on metal bunk beds, stashed their clothes and books under their quilts and studied wherever they could. Scarlet and I not only had space, we had furniture. Our fifteen-by-twelve-foot whitewashed room, overlooking an athletic field, had two wooden desks, two chairs, two beds, a small bookcase and a wooden armoire. Erica and I also had our own classrooms and a reading room, which the school stocked with Mao’s works and the scores of the so-called Eight Model Operas, the only works Mao’s wife allowed to be performed during the Cultural Revolution.

Even in Building Twenty-five, we had no hot water. We sluiced our faces in primitive stone troughs using icy artesian well water. During the hottest days, I fought an urge to drink the water straight from the tap, a sure invitation to Beijing Belly. Our only drinking water came from a boiler several buildings away. We filled our thermoses there, but I sweated even more when I tried drinking hot water to cool off. Our communal bathroom was a row of porcelain squat toilets, which I found somewhat daunting to use. I was always
afraid of falling in, and when I finally stood up, I would have a moment or two of dizziness and have to clutch the swinging doors to steady myself. I also had to wash all my laundry by hand, including my sheets, in a small enamel basin. I would have given my Mao button collection for a washing machine or a laundromat, but none existed. Although Grandfather Chong had begun his new life in Canada running a Chinese laundry, such services were considered bourgeois during the most fanatic years of the Cultural Revolution.

Twice a week, Erica and I patronized the campus bathhouse. For a two-cent ticket, we learned to jockey, soap stinging our eyes, with hundreds of other women and girls for a moment under the communal spigots. Because it was our only chance to get clean for several days, like the Chinese, we scrubbed ourselves and each other until we were all as red and shiny as tomatoes. I hated the days when I couldn’t have a shower, and planned my entire social life around Beijing University’s bathhouse schedule. To this day, I never take a shower without giving silent thanks for hot running water.

If Beijing University was treating us like revolutionary royalty, then the Chinese students who moved in with us were our ladies-in-waiting. Under orders to be nice to us, they tried to make our beds, do our laundry and even urged us to cut in line at the canteen. In short, they did everything except tell us what was really going on. The university uprooted about forty people in all for our benefit. Besides our dorm-mates, the school assigned us a housekeeper-guard, six administrators, three language professors, a cook and a typist. When we asked for tai-chi lessons, a coach from the athletics department took us through the paces of the languid exercises. When we expressed an interest in Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, a literature professor gave us a private lecture. When we went on tours of model factories, the school provided a car and driver. The university bought a ping-pong table for our dormitory and installed a telephone in our hall. I didn’t realize what a big deal that was until I learned that only the university chancellor had a home phone. All we paid for was the food we consumed, which came to a few dollars a month.

The housekeeper-guard, a white-haired elderly woman whom we respectfully called Granny, mopped the bathrooms and screened
our visitors. The typist, who also moved into Building Twenty-five, mimeographed our lessons and vocabulary lists. The six administrators, who worked out of the newly opened Foreign Students Office, had nothing better to do than challenge us to ping-pong matches at recess. It was the only time we weren’t treated like revolutionary royalty. They put devilish spins on the balls and delighted in beating us to a pulp.

The main administrator in charge of us was Huang Daolin, a brittle man with an elfin haircut, brown-rimmed glasses and cheekbones as hard and round as the ping-pong balls he loved to smash into our faces. In his mid-thirties, he was self-righteous, zealous and dogmatic, a typical Communist Party member without a shred of self-doubt. When embarrassed or upset, he laughed as if he were having a nervous breakdown, coyly shielding his bad teeth with his hand in a strangely feminine gesture. Cadre Huang had majored in radio physics at Beijing University but had been assigned to the Foreign Students Office after graduation. As my “handler”, he would try to imbue me with Maoism, criticize me for my bourgeois lapses and ruin my love life.

The best part of being revolutionary royalty was getting our own cook. Chef Liu was a grizzled old man who had cooked for John Leighton Stuart, the China-born head of Yenching University and the last U.S. ambassador to pre-Communist China, immortalized by Mao in an essay sarcastically titled
Farewell, Leighton Stuart! When
the Communists expropriated Yenching’s lovely campus, Chef Liu came with it. His Western repertoire included homemade potato chips, donuts, apple pie and shortbread cookies. His Chinese specialties included steamed buns stuffed with savory minced pork, crispy pancakes studded with chopped scallions, stir-fried chunks of eggplant in a spicy soy sauce, and plump little
jiaozi
, the ravioli northerners eat dipped in dark rice vinegar. For my twentieth birthday, the week after I arrived at Beijing University, Chef Liu made me a huge bowl of extra-long noodles symbolizing long life. When he discovered I loved spicy food, he tossed chili peppers into my fried rice at breakfast. And when Erica and I became homesick for hamburgers, he improvised by mincing some pork by hand and tossing in an egg, breadcrumbs and spices.