by Weijian Shan
Jimmy Carter won the election to become president of the United States in 1976. On New Year’s Day 1979, China and the United States formally established diplomatic relations. At the end of January 1979, Deng Xiaoping paid an official visit to the United States at the invitation of President Carter, the first Chinese leader to do so since the founding of the PRC in 1949. His visit also provided the Chinese public, for the first time, with an opportunity to get glimpses of the United States, as television cameras followed Deng everywhere while he was there.
Shortly after Deng’s return from the states, China launched a border war against Vietnam, purportedly to punish it for its invasion of Cambodia and for its incursions into what China considered its own territory. The war captured the public’s attention until it was concluded about one month later. The United States had untangled itself from the Vietnam War in 1975. China and the United States, former enemies, were now becoming friends. China and North Vietnam, former allies, now turned their guns on each other. It is really true that in international relations, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
* * *
Part of Deng’s education reform was to resume the examination system and to reward academic performance. Before winter break of 1977, we were given final exams, for the first time. The school authorities decided to post all the grades and, more boldly, to reassign classes based on the grades from the finals. Two “fast-pace” classes were formed to include the best students from the 10 classrooms. I was put into one of them. From the next semester on, I would have new classmates. The objective of the new system was to “produce talents faster.”
I was assigned to Classroom No. Four, and I was elected the class representative. The new students selected through the nationwide college entrance examination in the last two months of 1977 had begun their matriculation in late February 1978 as well. But we had little interaction with the students outside our own cohort.
The fast pace did make a difference. My new classmates were the best and brightest in their former classrooms. They were competitive, motivated, and always hungry for more from the teachers. We began to study English literature as well as business writing in English. My favorite authors were Mark Twain, for his great sense of humor; Ernest Hemingway, for his simple and short sentences, which were great for a foreign student of English; and Jack London, for the human struggles in his stories and his characters, some of whom I identified with. I also enjoyed the French author Guy de Maupassant, whose short stories, translated into English, were full of surprises, irony, and satire. I loved his short stories so much I translated some from English into Chinese.
By now, I was making good progress with my spoken English, which I practiced with my classmates and with the foreign teachers who came to China for a semester or two. Beyond listening comprehension and speaking, we also spent much time studying English grammar. The basics were not difficult to learn because the typical sentence structure in English is similar to Chinese, with the subject preceding the verb and the verb before the object. The difficult parts of the English language were the tenses, the moods, such as the subjunctive mood, and especially the articles. It did not seem that there were fixed rules on how to use an article. The teachers told us that as we read more and more English writing we would develop a feel for using that part of speech.
I decided that the best way to learn to speak fluently was to memorize English texts by listening to language tapes repeatedly, and by reciting them back loudly and often. I began to memorize and recite every passage, short story, or essay in our textbook from the beginning of the semester. Once I had committed the different expressions to memory, they came to me easily when I spoke the language. Every day, I would find a block of time to walk around campus, reciting all the passages in our textbook from the beginning to wherever it was we had got at that point. By the end of the semester, I could recite the entire textbook from beginning to end. In order to teach myself the subjunctive mood, for example, I memorized such passages as: “Whatever happened to her then may have determined whatever happened to her afterwards, and whatever happened to her afterwards may have driven her to suicide, a chain of events,” from the English play An Inspector Calls.
I wasn’t the only one doing this. Walking around the campus after dinnertime, I frequently passed classmates who were loudly reading or talking to themselves in English, French, German, Polish, Japanese, or Arabic, oblivious to their surroundings and others around them. There was one student in a senior class, by the name of Tang. He not only talked to himself all the time, he would come up to anyone to chat nonstop in English, regardless of whether or not his audience was interested. One of his classmates was so annoyed by him that he yelled, “I will slap your face if you don’t stop talking to me.”
The institute now had a reading room stocked with foreign newspapers and magazines. There were issues of the Times of London, Reader’s Digest, and the British Daily Mirror, whose naked “page 3” girls I found too scandalous to look at, yet too tantalizing to resist.
The English publications were typically outdated, but I didn’t care. I was not there to keep up with the news, which I got by listening to VOA and the BBC every day. I was there to learn the language and foreign culture.
Reader’s Digest was one of my favorites. It ran a condensed version of the novel A Town Like Alice, which I found mesmerizing. I particularly loved the regular feature Laughter: The Best Medicine. I remember a favorite joke of mine from that feature: “Men marry women hoping they will never change; women marry men hoping they will change. Both are disappointed.”
For the first time since before the Cultural Revolution, bookstores began to sell Chinese translations of foreign books. I bought two plays by Shakespeare translated into Chinese. I found them difficult, even in Chinese.
* * *
On January 10, 1979, our class graduated, three years and three months to the day after we matriculated on October 10, 1975. In keeping with the system at that time, everyone was assigned a job. None of us had a choice. Those assigned a job in Beijing were considered lucky, both for the living conditions and because Beijing was where the action was. It was the capital, and news traveled here first.
I stayed at BIFT and joined the English Department. Along with a few classmates who were also chosen, I would receive further training, for at least another year, in a faculty training program while serving as a faculty member.
I was given a salary of 49 yuan per month, a bit less than $32 at the official exchange rate, and just about $16 at the black market rate. Still, it was a big step up from the 15 yuan per month student stipend I was receiving previously.
Although I did not realize it at the time, Deng’s nine-day visit to the United States at the invitation of Jimmy Carter in 1979 would have an immense effect on my life. It not only paved the way for China to open its door to visiting foreigners, but also allowed Chinese to go abroad to study.
Deng, himself a work-study student in France in the 1920s, had already had the idea of sending Chinese students and scholars abroad to study before he left for the United States. In Washington, Jimmy Carter broached the subject of Chinese emigration with Deng. Under a piece of legislation known as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, the United States was not allowed to grant most-favored-nation trading status (which was important for facilitating China’s trade with the US) to any country that restricted emigration. This law was primarily aimed at Soviet-bloc countries, which had restricted travel for Jewish refugees and other religious minorities, but it affected China, a closed country, as well. It was a significant obstacle for increased trade between the two countries. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, after Carter brought up the subject, Deng leaned forward and said, “Fine. We’ll let them go. Are you prepared to accept 10 million?” Everyone laughed, as President Carter later recalled, although somewhat uneasily. It was said that Carter quickly dropped the subject.
The Americans thought Deng was joking. It would turn out that he was quite serious. His visit heralded China’s opening, including allowing overseas studies and emigration, an opening that started with a trickle but became a torrent. Soon so many were knocking on US doors that the limiting factor became the difficulty of getting a US visa.
We continued our studies with more advanced materials. Every week, we took classes in reading, writing, listening comprehension, and speaking, and every week there were tests and exams, which pressured us to study ever harder.
* * *
In late January 1977, while I was on winter break from school, I met a girl in the office of a mutual friend by chance. I had walked in to deliver a package from my mother to this friend only to find her chatting animatedly with another girl in a navy blue uniform. She was introduced to me as Shi Bin, a native of Beijing but now on a school break from a university in Harbin, in China’s far northeast. Bin was pretty, with big eyes and dark hair, and tall at 1.74 meters (∼5 feet 8 inches). It turned out that she played professional basketball for the women’s team of the navy. I was impressed by her personality—open, unreserved, confident, straightforward, and no-nonsense. I thought, “what a happy girl,” very different from many of the girls I had met who looked to have suffered too much in life and wore their miseries on their faces.
I would learn later that Bin had suffered more than most in the most unimaginable way. Just the previous year, while away at school, the massive earthquake struck her home city, Tangshan, and her father and two younger sisters were killed when the family home collapsed; her mother was severely injured.
But none of the pain of that tremendous loss was visible on her sunlit face.
Bin and I left the office of our friend together. She was headed in the same direction as my home so I offered to walk with her.
“Okay. But do you know the way?” she asked.
“Of course,” I replied. I was confident in my sense of direction. Even in the Gobi, surrounded by miles of emptiness, I had little trouble finding my way.
“Don’t worry,” I added nonchalantly, “all roads lead to Rome.” Beijing’s roads were generally laid out in a grid running north-south or east-west, and this pattern persisted even in the small and narrow lanes, or hutong, in residential neighborhoods. So, as long as we walked in the right direction, I was sure we would get to our destination.
As we walked we chatted with each other. I must have been too enamored and lost in conversation to notice where we were headed. We promptly came to a dead-end in a hutong.
“I thought you said all roads lead to Rome?” she prodded me, looking amused.
“Most of these hutong go straight through.” I tried to hide my embarrassment, but in vain. “I suppose this is one of the rare exceptions.”
Bin had a good laugh as we found our way back out. Her laughter relaxed me. Unconsciously, my use of the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” foreshadowed the inevitability of our relationship.
* * *
An opportunity came. In April 1979, I noticed an advertisement for a position at the United Nations in the newspaper. At that time, advertising in newspapers was almost unheard of in China, so the UN ad was particularly prominent, and it immediately caught my attention. It said that the UN would be recruiting simultaneous interpreters from China for the first time. The recruits would be put through a yearlong intensive training program established at the First Foreign Language Institute in Beijing. After the training program, the recruits would be posted to United Nations headquarters in New York City.
A group of us young faculty members from BIFT applied even though none of us had any great hope of being selected. The program was to test and interview candidates from three major cities in China—Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou—and would accept only 25 people in total. Who would want to miss a golden opportunity to go to the United States and to work at the UN? We were sure China’s best and brightest would come out, and the competition would be too difficult for us to have any chances.
Still, I thought there was no harm trying, and it would be a good exercise anyhow. In late April, I sat for the UN exam and did well enough to advance to the next round. I was relaxed when I took that second round of exams, as I had no expectation to be selected from among so many. Although the tests were rigorous and the subjects quite wide-ranging, I did not feel they were particularly hard. I was quite pleased, and somewhat surprised, when I received notice that I had made it into the third round. This thing suddenly looked quite real. If I did get selected, it would change my life. I had never expected to work abroad, and for the United Nations, no less. Now my hopes were up.
The third round was not so much a test as a face-to-face interview with the UN recruiters, representatives from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and professors from Beijing First Language Institute. It was held at the Beijing International Club, a building next to Beijing’s diplomatic district. The finalists waited in line to be ushered into the interview room. When it was almost my turn, I suddenly became nervous as hell. I was fully conscious that this would be the chance of a lifetime, for so much was at stake. Afraid to say something wrong, I seized up.
I walked into a big room to see more than a dozen examiners sitting in a semicircle. Some of them were foreigners and others were Chinese. The examiners looked friendly, but that did not ease my extreme nervousness. I was seated in a chair in the center facing the interviewers. Then they took turns asking me questions. I answered them mechanically. I was so nervous that I literally didn’t know what I was talking about.
The only question I still remember was: “What do you think about the Cultural Revolution?” By that time the Communist Party itself had concluded that the Cultural Revolution was “10 years of catastrophe” and it was no longer taboo to be openly critical of it. I wanted to say that by the end of the period, the economy was on the verge of being completely destroyed. In my nervousness, instead of using the passive tense—being destroyed—I said “on the verge of destroying.” I immediately realized my grammatical mistake but I still couldn’t bring the correct expression to mind. My heart sank. I thought I had blown the opportunity. I was quite disappointed with myself and regretted that I missed this opportunity so close at hand because I was not calm enough. I could not get over this nagging feeling of regret for a few days. But eventually I decided to put the whole matter out of my mind. It was July and the summer break began. I shifted my focus to find something interesting to do.
* * *
Toward the end of August, I returned to the BIFT campus to begin the autumn semester of faculty training. As I passed through the wrought-iron gate, someone working in the messenger’s office stepped out and stopped me. “Hey,” he said, “you had a letter from the First Foreign Language Institute.”
“Where’s the letter?” I asked. I knew it had to be about the UN program. I was surprised to hear from them again. “It sat here for some time and eventually we handed it over to the personnel department,” the man replied.
I hurried to the personnel department, but nobody could find it. Apparently, the letter was lost. I got on my bike and rode to the First Foreign Language Institute to find out what they wanted.
There, I met with Professor Zhang Zailiang, one of the instructors in charge of the UN program. He said there was good news and bad news. I did indeed do poorly during the interview, and I placed 33rd on the test, and did not make the cutoff to join the class of 25 students who would take the UN translator program that year. But I had done well enough to earn a spot in the second training program, which would begin in the winter of the following year.
Since I had completely given up hope and put the UN thing out of my mind, I was quite delighted by this news. Now it was just a matter of time until I could attend this program, which would prepare me to work as an interpreter at the UN headquarters in New York City.
I went to see Bin to share the news with her. As the weather was hot, we decided to go out to buy
a watermelon to celebrate. As we were trying to pick a ripe melon from a stand on the street, I heard someone yelling, “Stop, thief!” A man dashed past, pursued by a group. Without thinking, I dropped the melon and joined the chase. But the thief ran like a rabbit and eventually got away.
When she finally caught up with me, Bin looked worried and said in a reproachful voice, “What were you doing?”
“Catching a thief,” I replied, matter-of-factly.
“What did he do? Steal a watermelon?” she asked.
I really had no idea what the offense was. He must have been guilty of something, as he was running away.
“That wasn’t worth it and so dangerous,” she said. “What if he had a knife? What if he turned around and stabbed you in your eye?”
“Then I would still be a one-eyed UN interpreter,” I teased her. From that day on, from time to time Bin would call me a one-eyed UN interpreter.
* * *
On Saturday, October 27, 1979, Bin and I went on our own to register to be married. There was a marriage license office in a village near the institute. I rode my bicycle with Bin seated behind me on the small baggage rack. The dirt road through the vegetable field was quite bumpy, and I pedaled slowly to make sure that I would not fall and drop my bride into the mud. The village was called Taiyanggong (Sun Temple). Until 50 years earlier, there had been a small temple where people would come to worship the sun god. The temple had long since disappeared, but the name remained. Now Taiyanggong was a farming village, producing vegetables for the city.
The office door was locked when we got there, and no one seemed to be around. We had to search out the person responsible for marriage registration. Finally, we found a middle-aged woman. I supposed it was rare for people outside the village to come here for marriage registration. She seemed a little annoyed to be disturbed.