*China*
To walk through downtown Peking on a fine fall day is to know the meaning of the phrase ‘the mass of humanity’ and if you are a Westerner on foot for the first time in modern China you move with some anxiety. We passed the PLA soldiers guarding the wide driveways leading up to the main entrance of the Peking Hotel and then we turned left off Ch’ang An onto Wan Fu Jing, one of the busiest shopping streets in the city. It was still too early in the year for the switch to the wintertime blue so the street was a seething tide of grey, jackets and slacks, women and men, as far as the eye could see. Most of the shops near the hotel were for the foreigners and overseas Chinese who came for a week or two on packaged and carefully monitored tours, but as we moved away from Ch’ang An and toward the Number One Department Store there were fewer places selling chou bronzes and celadon vases and more selling inexpensive clothing and Chinese books and everyday cooking utensils. In one store we saw a Chang Dynasty wine amphora that was supposed to have belonged to someone named Chen Fei in the 1890’s and a strikingly realistic three-colored Tang horse, but for the most part we waded through mobs of people who stood twenty and thirty deep in front of counters displaying the latest sweaters or shirts available to the Chinese in 1980, which meant that when we finally got close enough to actually see what all the pushing and shoving was about we were invariable surprised to find that the item was bland in color and almost nondescript in terms of style.
Mr. Ma, the man in charge of the three American lecturers assigned to Peking University for the year, led us through the crowds with efficient and athletic grace. He had done the same thing when we had arrived by air a week earlier, easing us through customs and organizing the transfer of our baggage with a quiet air of politeness and authority. I didn’t speak ten words of Chinese -- the three of us had met for the first time in Paris just before we boarded the C.A.A.C. flight and it soon became clear that none of us spoke the language -- but there was little doubt that he operated on the basis of friendship and mutual respect rather than any fear of power. He made sure each of us was introduced to the two drivers of our unmarked grey Shanghai taxis and he was thoughtful enough to use the term for ‘comrade’ (one of the few I recognized) when presenting each of us to the two men. They were dressed in the same kind of grey outfit as Mr. Ma was wearing, but I noticed that his Mao jacket had four front pockets and theirs each had only two.
The shopping tour was only part of the overall orientation we received that first week before the university officially began its classes; just before we actually started to work -- almost two weeks after the official start of term because the last few members of our pre-selected group of students had not yet arrived on campus -- we were invited to a welcoming banquet by the head of the university. It was a study in contrasts; a large white-walled room, devoid of any paintings or pictures or objects of ornamentation of any kind, in a small restaurant tucked between two narrow alleys, or hutongs, just off Tien An Men, probably the world’s largest public square, and into this bare room a half dozen white-jacketed waitresses brought ten courses of the most colorful and delicious food I’d ever experienced. We sat at a large round table and the four glasses in front of each setting were constantly refilled with plum wine, Tsingtao beer, orange soda, and mao-tai, the fiery Chinese equivalent of pure grain alcohol, and after an interminable speech of welcome by the senior Chinese official and a briefer response by the American ambassador -- each speech made longer by the need for simultaneous translations -- a series of bottoms-up toasts were offered to the recently renewed good relations between the people of China and the people of the United States of America and by the time the soup was served to end the meal there were so many gambeis! being suggested (each requiring that you completely empty the glass that you had raised) that a sober observer could easily have assumed that Sino-American friendship was a sure thing for the next one hundred years. Our ambassador, an ex-labor union leader who seemed to respect our hosts and who made an effort to understand them, probably knew better, but he impressed the three of us as newcomers with his ability to gambei with the best of them.
We were feeling no pain when we returned to our rooms at the Friendship Guesthouse, the Youyi Binguan, after that first banquet. We had each been given apartments on the same floor of building Number Four and they were almost identical. Talya and I had a small balcony to go with our bedroom and small living-room and bathroom; Lawrence Timothy Maguire, an American Studies specialist from Columbia, had the apartment across the hall and Noah Bannister, a Stanford professor, could boast a partial view of the Western Hills, a green area just on the edge of the city. The four of us fell into the bulky but comfortable 1950’s armchairs in Bannister’s living room to have a nightcap and to get to know each other a little better. By the time the evening was over I had at least a general picture of the two people who would be working with me for the year at Beida, the abbreviated Chinese way of referring to Beijing (Peking) University.
Larry Maguire, at 45, was the oldest of us and in Chinese terms this meant that he was automatically our ‘team leader’ and all communication between the people at the university and the three American foreigners, the Weigwos, would be through him. Recently divorced and showing all the signs of being in acute pain at the loss of his teenage daughter -- she and the mother had moved to California -- he was a somber yet aggressive first-generation product of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen area who’d come up the academic ladder the hard way: tuitionless City College in New York before the open admissions policy; full scholarship for five years of graduate work at Columbia while working as a teaching assistant to help pay the rent; two dozen articles and three books -- one of them I knew to be a definitive text in his field -- since receiving his doctorate. Columbia had held on to him and it sounded as if he liked it there, but the breakup of his marriage was more than he could handle in familiar surroundings. He had welcomed the change to come to China for a while.
Noah Bannister had chosen to come for a different reason. Easy-going and darkly handsome, he was a 35 year old product of Southern California sun who was unmarried and who seemed to like it that way. His father, now dead, had been a world-class athlete and then a very successful actor and director and his mother, still living in Bel Air, was on the board of trustees at Cal Tech and kept herself busy by buying up Art Nouveau pieces and donating them to various museums. Noah had given up his surfboard for four years to attend Harvard, but he’d returned to the coast to drift into graduate school at Berkeley, where he developed a genuine interest in the work of both Joseph Conrad and the L.A. mystery writers such as Chandler and Thomas B. Dewey. A book on the connection between high art and popular art, published by the University of California Press, had gotten him an appointment at Stanford, and the offer to come to China had been made just as he was looking for something interesting to do for his first sabbatical. He’d wanted to bring the woman he’d been living with with him, but the Chinese made it clear that only legitimate spouses of foreign scholars would be welcome and neither he nor the woman were anxious to enter into a marriage of convenience or a complicated year-long deception of the Chinese authorities. He said he was sad that they had had to part, but he was smiling good-naturedly as he said it.
The university was our work unit, or danwei, and as such it had the overall responsibility for us as long as we remained in the country. Mr. Ma arranged our rooms, our board and our transportation and he coordinated our work schedules as well as the schedules of the students in our particular courses. He arranged for Talya and me to study Chinese three nights a week with a tutor who came to our apartment each time after first being checked by a PLA soldier at the main gate of the walled compound of the Youyu Binguan; the soldier would call our apartment to announce our visitor and make sure we agreed to receive her. Mrs. Chu was almost 50 and she looked twenty years younger. She taught English on the state-run television during the afternoons and she was something of a public personality in a land where cultivating ano
nymity was an accepted way of life; after a few months we would meet on Saturday or Sunday morning and we would walk around the city as she shopped or ran errands, all the while drilling us in the relevant Chinese in a hands-on approach that took some of the initial pain out of learning an unfamiliar tonal language, and often she would be approached by people who recognized her from the T.V. and the more aggressive ones would even ask for her autograph. When we witnessed this the first time we were surprised by what we had come to regard as uncommon public demonstrations. Mrs. Chu agreed that such things were still unusual, but she pointed out that Mao and the disastrous Cultural Revolution were now almost four years in the past and even in ponderous China things were slowly changing.
“As one of your own writers has recently said, we are a country of small signs, of vast shifts in ideology masking subtle human changes. We are, you know, a nation of bombastic rhetoric hiding small but significant human changes.”
“Do you think the current effort by Deng Xiaoping and other leaders to de-emphasize Mao’s importance, to at least semi-officially recognize the failure of the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966, will be accepted by most of the people?” Talya asked her.
“It is very difficult to say. So many of us suffered so terribly during the Cultural Revolution that we should probably question many of Mao’s teachings, but there are some among the leaders who blame the Gang of Four -- Yao Wen-yuan, Change Chun-chiao, Wang Hung-wen and Chiang Ching, Mao’s widow -- for most of the horrible excesses of that ten year period. You will have to see for yourselves, I believe. Mao’s writings are not in such good favor these days as they once were, but one essay still makes some sense to me. In it he says that whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, by living in its environment. If you want knowledge, you must take part in the changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. Such teachings were used to justify the sending of all intellectuals to the countryside, of course, but the basic idea may still be a sound one. You two, in fact, have come a very long way just to taste the pear that is China.”
On our weekend walks we would sometimes stop at the Peking Hotel for coffee or an ice cream; Mrs. Chu was known well enough to be allowed to walk in with us, but the average Chinese had little chance of getting by the soldiers at the gate. The hotel was primarily for foreigners and some very wealthy overseas Chinese and every time I entered the place after I’d been in China a while I would think of the same thing: on the gate of a park near the Hwang Po River in Shanghai there was once a large sign that read ‘NO CHINESE AND DOGS ALLOWED’. In those days foreigners held Shanghai in what amounted to economic bondage -- the Bund along the waterfront housed representatives of all the major banks of Europe, the Jin Jiang Hotel was a French enclave, and the high-ceilinged rooms of the Huping Fandian, the Peace Hotel, were filled with German and British traders --but even in post-Mao times I couldn’t shake the feeling that the average Chinese was still not treated very well in his own country, even by his own people.
I had been working at the university a little more than a month when I received a phone call from a Miss Bonnie Low. She said she was the Hong Kong branch manager of Bank of America and that she was in Peking for a few days to arrange the rental of space for the new office the bank was opening here in another month or so. She said that she had once worked for the bank in Taiwan, and there had met Lynn Boaz, currently the Public Affairs Officer in our embassy here, and that he had recently given her my name as someone who might be able to help her with a problem that had arisen. When I asked what the problem was -- I’d only met Boaz once, at the welcoming banquet, and as far as I could remember we hadn’t exchanged more than two dozen words -- she said she’d rather talk about it in person so she’d be willing to buy me dinner the following evening at the Japanese restaurant on the second floor of the Peking Hotel, where she was staying, if I had the time. It was the only Japanese restaurant in Peking and I remembered Mrs. Chu telling us the portions were meager, by Chinese standards, but that the food was excellent, so I agreed. As I hung up I was thinking more about Talya’s reaction to the fact that I was going to try one of the city’s better restaurants for the fist time without her rather than about the strangeness of the call itself.
Bonnie Low turned out to be small and pretty and very much a woman of the world, a Chinese-American from San Francisco who had graduated summa cum laude as an economics and international studies major from Georgetown University and then had worked for the Bank of America in California, New York, Taiwan and Hong Kong. During a very slowly-served dinner accompanied by some fine hot sake we talked of our backgrounds and how we had come to be in Peking. She had risen quite rapidly in the bank and it wasn’t difficult to see why; in addition to Mandarin and Cantonese she spoke respectable French and passable German, and there was toughness just beneath the attractive surface that hinted at both efficiency and a touch of ruthlessness. At 33 she had been in charge of the bank’s Hong Kong branch for two years and, now that mainland China had finally agreed to allow a few Western banks to open offices in Peking, she had been assigned the task of establishing the new branch.
“Which brings us to the reason for my buying you this delicious dinner and plying you with the hen-hao booze,” she said after we had ordered some dessert and the white-jacketed Chinese waitress had ambled slowly off toward the kitchen.
“Yes, I was wondering about that. I don’t know Mr. Lynn Boaz at all and I was unaware that he knew very much about me -- but I assume you know all of this.”
Her small smile created the only lines in an otherwise perfectly smooth-skinned face,
“I worked in Taiwan for three years and Lynn was the assistant cultural attaché in our embassy in Teipei during my last two years there. He’s been posted to Moscow and Finland since then I think, but he’s really an old China-hand and very happy to finally get assigned here, to the heart of the universe, the very center of the middle kingdom. He speaks absolutely perfect Chinese and now he can finally use it again. He said you had lived abroad before and that he knew of you through a mutual friend -- fellow in Greece named Meadows.”
My surprise must have been evident because she chuckled quietly before continuing.
“Lynn says that your appointment to lecture at Beida will allow you plenty of time to travel and you will probably be invited to give talks at other universities in various parts of the country. Being designated by the government as a ‘long-term foreign expert’ as well as a ‘friend of China’ means that you will be given more freedom to move around and access to more areas than most other westerners, including overseas Chinese like me. My problem -- the bank’s problem -- is that we have no one who can move around the country very freely, at least not without constant hassles from the government’s China Travel Service, and we feel that we need such access at this time. Our president, Thomas Histon, is a very capable man and he flew into Hong Kong last week to try to arrange something with both the British authorities there and the Chinese authorities here. The red-tape involved seems to be impenetrable.
“We believe that if Deng Ziaoping and his people remain in power long enough, and if there is no major backlash against his pragmatic rapprochement with the West, then its only a matter of time before investment capital will be allowed to funnel into various parts of the country; the bank has contacts in several places quite far from Peking, but our communication with these people is very limited. If we are to be ready to do business in these areas as soon as -- if -- China really opens up to the West, we have to lay the groundwork now. Would you be willing to transport letters and other bank business documents to our Chinese contacts in other parts of the country when you go to those places?”
The dessert was served and I took a few spoonfuls of mine before replying, trying to sort my questions into some kind of order.
“Would I be breaking any Chinese laws”
First it’s ‘we’ and then it’s ‘me’ and what will it turn out to be in the final analysis, assuming for the moment that there’ll be one?
“What if I’m searched and the documents I’m carrying are found?”
“Given your designation and your professional status in your danwei, there should never be any reason to search you. On the contrary, you will most likely be treated with the utmost respect and deference. To search you and find nothing would be a serious loss of face -- the responsible parties would, at the very least, lose their jobs and a job is not easy to come by in China these days.”
“But what if?”
“I don’t know. There’s no precedent.”
“Does Mr. Boaz get involved if anything goes wrong?”
“Not officially.”
I couldn’t suppress a smile.
“Aside from my helping an American firm get its foot in the unpredictable door of the dragon’s lair before someone like Banco di Roma or Tokyo or Saudi First National, can you think of one good reason why I should get involved in all this?”
“Lynn says his friend told him that you don’t have many opportunities to work under real pressure and that you might welcome the chance to do so every so often. Just to keep your hand in, so to speak. His friend also told him that your instinct was to confront dangerous situations rather than avoid them and that this would someday cause you no end of grief.”
“Some friend. And you’ve obviously done your homework. But did he also mention that I would want a great deal of money for being so helpful?”
I resented that old feeling of being manipulated, of others being more sure of me than I was of myself, and I wanted to see that smooth composure disturbed a little. It worked. She paled visibly and almost stuttered before she spoke.
“No -- uh -- yes, I’m sure we’d be more than happy to pay you for your assistance. We certainly don’t expect you to do this for nothing -- not at all -- it would have to be in cash, of course, and it probably should be - - -.”
“Not to worry, Miss Low. If I decided to help you there’ll be no charge, except for any added expenses I might incur as the result of my carrying your material; I assume we can talk about the specifics of pick-up and delivery if I decide to lend the bank a hand. Shall I give you my answer tomorrow -- downstairs in the lobby at eight o’clock okay with you?”
She agreed, her composure regained, and after we’d finished our dessert she paid in crisp new yuan notes and we parted with a handshake at the elevator. Just before I turned away I noticed a new glint of interest in her look and I thought of how necessary a little shaking up of the old routine is for almost everyone, even self-assured bank managers -- just to keep your hand in, Miss Low, so to speak.
The pre-selected students who attended our lectures were often older than us so we decided to refer to them as participants, a term which helped us to tone down the usually important distinction between a person whose name is preceded by lao, meaning older and wiser and therefore due some respect, and one whose name is preceded by chao, denoting youth and inexperience. There were forty-five of them, ranging in age form 23 to 54, and they were mostly teachers from middle schools, institutes and universities in other parts of the country, all selected by their danweis and the Ministry of Education to be sent to Peking University for a year to be exposed to the pedagogy of American academics. Many of the participants had been imprisoned or sent to do manual labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a few were university professors in their own right who had studied in England or the States as young students before liberation by Mao and the communists in 1949, and almost all of them were at Beida without their spouses or children, a separation quite common in modern China and bemoaned by many.
For the first few weeks the three of us wondered what we were doing wrong; the participants were attentive and seemed eager and highly motivated when they talked to us individually outside of class, but in the lecture rooms it was as if we were addressing a bunch of zombies. Back at the Youyi Binguan at night we’d sit around drinking tea or half-liter bottles of Chinese beer, pijiao, and try to figure out what the problem was. After a few such sessions, and a few bottles of Tsingtao, our ideas were often less than scintillating.
“My theory,” Larry would offer, “is that at some point near the beginning of term I must have gone into my classroom without having zipped up my fly and now they’re too embarrassed to participate or stand up and say anything about my lectures because they don’t want me to see them giggle and thus be embarrassed myself. In other words, they all lower their heads and say nothing when I ask a question because they don’t want me to lose face.”
“That, my good man, may explain your failure to reach these obviously very bright people but what about me?” Noah asks. “I usually wear these Ocean Pacific specials that have no zipper in the front. No, I think they don’t respond in my class because of that huge goddam picture of Mao hanging on the wall above the blackboard just behind me. They’re so used to just accepting what they’re given, with that father-figure looming over them wherever they turn, that they’re just not used to questioning what they hear -- even if sometimes it’s nothing but pedantic bullshit.”
“Maybe it’s that their English comprehension isn’t that great and we’re all talking too fast in class,” I suggest, and if Talya is with us she points at me and nods emphatically, but Noah speaks in a slow, flat, unaccented California manner so we know that that can’t be the whole problem.
One day I mentioned our frustration to Ma. As a man in his early fifties he deserved the respectful appellation of lao, but he had asked us not to bother with it. His high cheekbones and smooth dark skin gave him the look of a handsome Mongolian, although he came from the coastal town of Tsingtao, now the home of China’s best beer. He was a small, compact, extremely athletic man who had fought in the south with the communists in 1948, been imprisoned as an intellectual who refused to deny his background during the Cultural Revolution (one of his children had died of starvation while he was in confinement because his wife had been taken way suddenly one night by a band of young Red Guards and nobody knew the baby was still in the empty house), and who now was still a member of the Party and still believed in working indefatigably for the betterment of the people. Through all of his turbulent life he had remained, in spite of its contradictions with twentieth century communism, an ardent and very knowledgeable student of the teachings of Confucius and he responded to me in the soft voice and balanced phrases that are such an important part of the Confucian ideal.
“To understand a man you must know his memories. Your students come from many different backgrounds -- some from the army, some from factory worker families, some from the homes of peasants, and some from the world of the intellectuals -- but all have been through the bad times of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They all know what it meant to be different in those days, to be isolated from the group and to be beaten and tortured and to see your friends and family publicly disgraced, imprisoned, or even killed. These people you are teaching are still so close to those times -- after all, it is only four years since Mao died -- that their instincts are still governed by them.
“There is, of course, an old saying that explains this condition: ‘a person fears fame the way a pig is afraid of becoming fat.’ Your students are very eager to learn from you. They know they are very lucky to be given this chance to study here at Beida with you and they do not want to disgrace their danweis or jeopardize their own future. Perhaps it will take time and you will need much patience, but I think most people can be taught how to give up some of their fears. Your students are not familiar with volunteering to speak in front of others except in self-criti
cism sessions. They are not afraid of you or Bannister or Maguire; they fear the ridicule of their fellow students if they should say something unworthy or stupid. They would not want you to lose face because of their poor performance.
“Perhaps you should talk to them about how Americans teach, about what is acceptable behavior in your classes. I am sure that will help, but I am also sure that much patience will still be necessary.”
I passed on Ma’s advice to Noah and Larry and within a month we all noticed a marked improvement. Many participants still refused to raise their hands and volunteer any opinions, but quite a few more were getting into the habit of doing so regularly; by mid-November Noah reported a knock-down-drag-out discussion about literary style in one of his classes that almost had half-a-dozen participants come to blows. He quipped that we might rue the day we opened up this particular Chinese box, but we all knew we’d gotten over at least one major hurdle.
It was about this time, too, that Ma told me he had received an invitation from the president of Shandong University for me to give a lecture there. The university was in the city of Jinan, he said, a crowded and rather uninteresting place that seemed to be under a perpetual cloud of coal dust from the heavy industry that dominated the area, but the invitation included a weekend trip in one of the university’s mini-buses to the small town of Qufu, the ancestral home of Confucius. Talya was also invited and we told Ma we’d be happy to go; he was delighted that we would be seeing the home of his favorite philosopher--theoretician and he spent hours giving us detailed instructions about what to see and do there.
A few days later I called Bonnie Low and told her of our trip and she said she’d have some papers for me to take to a Mr. Xin in Jinan. I had agreed to do her the occasional favor as long as I knew exactly what I was carrying each time. She’d been less than enthusiastic about my demand, but eventually she’d agreed. The night before Talya and I boarded the southbound train at the cavernous main railway station I met Bonnie at the Peking Hotel and she handed me a packet of letters, each written in Chinese on bank stationary and with a typed translation in English attached. Back at the apartment I placed the letters between the pages of my lecture notes in my battered briefcase and on the train next day I kept the briefcase close at hand at all times.
It was a pleasant journey in our soft sleeper coach -- Ma had gotten us a four-bedded compartment for ourselves, the most comfortable of the four kinds of accommodation on Chinese trains: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper -- and when we stepped down onto the crowded platform in Jinan a delegation from the university was there to meet us. A small welcoming banquet that night was presided over by the president and after it his wife offered to show Talya some of the old photographs of the school, a few of which were from the pre-liberation period of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. I excused myself to take a short walk around that part of the city closest to the school before going to bed and at the red kiosk nearest the main gate a man identified himself as Mr. Xin, just as Bonnie had said he would, and I gave him the packet of letters. The next day I gave my lecture in a bare-walled and unheated auditorium and the following morning Talya and I and an interpreter/guide were driven to Qufu in a late-model Yugoslavian mini-bus. The town was quiet and peaceful and we spent the night in a small room off one of the several courtyards that made up the Confucian complex, a modest but well-preserved compound that had been damaged by the Red Guards in the sixties and then restored by government order after 1976 to be used as a tourist site for Westerners who were once again being allowed to visit the land of the dragon, that supreme symbol of the emperor and the source of life-giving rain. The home of Confucius, the man who lived five hundred years before Christ and whose teachings were suppressed by not only the very first emperor but by almost every other Chinese ruler since then, was a source of both pride and some slight embarrassment for the present leaders. Whereas the later Tan Dynasty had efficiently given China the labyrinthian bureaucracy it was still saddled with, Confucius had given it an ideal of both morality and practical government that had proven to be almost impossible to achieve. Confucius taught that rulers should govern by the example of their own moral virtue, not by force; the emperor at the top should use the family as the model for the nation, each member knowing his or her place, each obeying those above them and treating with compassion those below.
Talya and I could sense the Confucian ideal in the peaceful orderliness of his well-proportioned home -- the need for a ruler to be balanced, upright, harmonious and virtuous -- but driving down through the fields during harvest time the previous day our guide had mentioned that four out of five of China’s one billion people live and work on the land and we wondered how anyone, benevolent dictator or pragmatic central committee, could control or even keep track of so massive and disparate a people in the twentieth century without the use (or threat of the use) of some form of force. The ideal of a moral government had, down through the centuries, found its architectural manifestation in the Forbidden City, those 250 acres of impressive buildings and grounds laid out in precise and symbolic proportion in the center of Peking, at the very heart of the universe, but in reality no common Chinese (until Liberation) could ever enter the place except on pain of death. Standing in the quiet courtyards of Qufu I could imagine an ancient Chinese peasant actually believing the aphorism that ‘the mountain is high and the emperor is far away’, but in modern Peking a special section of the old Forbidden City is reserved for the nation’s elderly rulers and there are very few who pass by that high brick wall everyday -- and they number in the millions -- who would make the mistake of thinking that the government does not steadfastly control almost every aspect of their existence. Confucius may be acceptable enough these days to share with the odd visiting barbarian now and then, but the Chinese know that Deng Xiaoping and the other senior members of the Party actually run their vast country with very few nods in the old philosopher’s direction.
Soon after Talya and I returned to Peking from Qufu and Jinan we received two tickets for a reception in honor of a visiting American politician who sat on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, a committee that was then considering the advisability of our selling some very sophisticated military equipment to China. The reception was held in the Great Hall of the People, a massive building that dominates one corner of Tien An Men Square, and most of the ten thousand seats were already filled by the time we arrived. Larry and Noah had also been invited and Ma sat with us to help with any interpreting that might be necessary. I noticed Lynn Boaz and other embassy people up on the raised central platform and just to their right I could see Bonnie Low sitting among a small group of well-dressed and very prosperous looking men, all Westerners, who were being served large covered cups of tea by unusually attentive fu-yuen, the ubiquitous attendants assigned to specific work units such as hotels or to important foreigners. At the Youyi Binguan they made beds and cleaned rooms and kept careful track of our comings and goings, but here they simply kept the boiled hot water and the hot tea available for the more important members of the audience.
Deng himself was the host that night and with the help of several female translators he welcomed the visiting politicians, in particular the senior Senator who headed the delegation, and then he proceeded to give a lengthy speech about the need for China to continue to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with the West if she were to fulfill her role as the leader in the great socialist revolution. I remembered reading somewhere that he was born in 1904 and as I watched him deliver his prepared address I was impressed with how vigorous and healthy he looked at 76, especially when compared to some of the other senior Party officials seated alongside him on the platform, many of whom were assisted throughout the evening by two or three women in white jackets and baggy white slacks who looked like nurses rather than fu-yuen. He was, as far as I could tell from the translation, an effective speaker and as he summed up his defense of his very pragmatic approach to Sino-American relation
s -- a defense he felt was necessary because, as he very carefully suggested, there were those in his country who felt that such cooperation with the West would only compromise and dilute the original aims of those who brought about Liberation in 1949 -- he asked a question that both appealed to the pro-Western modernists in the audience and made an attempt to appease the aphoristically inclined traditionalists who were waiting for the internal political pendulum to swing back to the left again. His ‘What does it matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice?’ brought the standard five minute ovation and I noticed that although Bonnie Low’s smile wasn’t quite as wide and beaming as the senior Senator’s, her applause was just as enthusiastic.
As we filed out of the hall and moved down the marble steps toward our waiting grey taxis I caught just a glimpse of Bonnie and Lynn Boaz getting into the same long black limousine, one of the lumbering and curtained honggi usually reserved for important Party members or privileged bureaucrats or foreigners who are being treated with particular deference by someone with influence.
In the weeks that followed there was an unofficial but definite cooling of relations between many Chinese who had positions of responsibility and those Americans who were long-term residents of the country. Reagan had been elected President but would not take office until January and his pre-election rhetoric had not been very friendly toward China; nobody in China was sure but most of them kept their distance from us in case the leadership decided that America was once again a heinous villain and an enemy of the great socialist experiment. With the long history of guilt-by-association still unbroken in China, not very many people wanted to take the chance on us. The taxi drivers ignored our greetings, the fu-yuen at the Youyi were either distant or plain surly, and even some of our student-participants avoided us in the halls at the university.
After a few days of this we were visited by Ma in the office the three of us shared and it became even clearer to us that he was an exceptional person in a land where being an exception could be a very dangerous undertaking.
“I do not wish to intrude, but I know that none of you are in the habit of taking advantage of our traditional xiu-xi after lunch so I thought that instead of a brief sleep you might welcome a brief conversation,” Ma said with more directness than he normally used with us.
“Please come in,” Noah said, “and have some hot water.” We knew he preferred the plain boiled water to the tea, both of which were constantly replenished for us during the day by a young participant to whom Ma had given the task.
“We were just talking about how things have changed around here for us since we heard about the election of our new President,” Larry said with a chuckle, being careful not to let it sound as if we thought Ma was in any way to blame for the change.
“That is what I thought you might want to have a conversation about,” Ma responded with a warm smile and a nod of his head. “It is not unusual for our people to pick up rumors about potential shifts and changes in government policy and to shy away from the foreign friends they have made until the official policy of our leaders has been made clear. I believe that is what is happening with you and your country at this time. I would not treat it as anything very serious at this point, however; there is a great deal of good feeling that has been built up between Chinese people and American people lately and I would say that such feeling will survive even this present uncertain period between our governments. And is it not true that what your leaders say before they are chosen is not always the same as what they do after they are chosen? I believe it is the same for leaders everywhere, is it not?”
“What do you think will be the result of all this on our work here?” I asked him. “You should know that we received phone calls early this morning at the Youyi from Mr. Boaz at our embassy. He said he thought it would be wise for us to be prepared to leave China on very short notice if relations between our two governments didn’t improve in the next few weeks.”
“I think your Mr. Boaz speaks our language very much like our best poets, but he also reacts too quickly and dramatically to rumors in his own diplomatic community. I think you will remain here the full term of your contracts, if you so desire. We need America and other capitalist countries to help us move intelligently into the next century. We can learn a great deal from you and I believe our present leaders realize this. If they do not, I think they do not deserve to be in power.”
Coming from a foreigner it might have been nothing more than polite criticism, but coming from a long-standing member of the Chinese Communist Party, speaking in a building located in the same city as the country’s source of absolute control, it was nothing less than dangerous heresy. We’d been in the country long enough to realize this and to appreciate the man’s courage and his personal integrity; we knew our phone conversations were often monitored and we assumed our office was not secure so none of us had very much to say in the face of such a display. After giving us the details of a trip to Shanghai the three of us were to make to lecture at Fudan University, Ma quietly took his leave.
Two weeks later the tension between Washington and Peking was eased a little when a member of the Reagan transition team let it leak to the press that their man might be rethinking his position on supplying the Taiwan government with some of our more advanced jet fighters. A few days after that the three of us and Ma boarded the train for Shanghai and prepared for the twenty-four hour ride by setting out a bottle of red wine and several bottles of pijiao on the drop-down table in our compartment that already had four covered cups of tea on it. Before the train pulled out the female attendant had placed a thermos of hot water under the table and informed us that she would let us know when we should go back to the dining car for dinner. As we got underway the strident sounds of a traditional Peking opera came screeching out of the speaker above the compartment’s door; the train had a modern sound system that seemed somewhat incongruous in the old-fashioned wood-trimmed compartments, with their curtained windows and plush velvet seats and ornate lampshades, and it took us several painful minutes before we could figure out how to turn down the volume on our speaker. Ma informed us that short of pulling out a wire or two there was no way of turning the thing off completely, but that the music and high-pitched announcements about the train’s progress and the weather en route would go off at 9:30 -- official bedtime on long-distance runs -- and come back on again at 6:30 in the morning. Larry, who always arranged his schedule so he’d never have to lecture before 11:00 a.m., groaned in anticipatory agony at the information.
It was a cold fall day and as we left the outskirts of the capital and moved along the level land to the south I could see smoke from the coal fires in the brick houses of the smaller villages and every so often a group of peasants, bundled in layers of blue, bent over in the brown fields. As our train passed over a narrow river I looked down into a junk-rigged barge that was loaded with cabbages; two very young children, each dressed in blue quilted jackets and bright red pants slit open up the back for rapid toilet training, waved and laughed and tumbled about on the top of the pile and then disappeared in a flash to be replaced by the river’s high muddy bank and then the seemingly endless brown fields. By the time we slowed to cross the bridge over the Yangtze the sun was a pale yellow wafer slipping behind some distant hills and the fields had given way to green-rimmed rice paddies and an intricate system of narrow waterways. Once we crossed the river the houses seemed less substantial, less likely to be made of brick, and there were only a few small boats making their way along the canals; the light outside faded quickly and the overhead light in the compartment came on.
The Shadow Knows Page 16