Preface

I first visited the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 1977. United States–China relations had not yet been normalized, Mao Zedong had been dead less than a year, and political posters plastered everywhere showed the Chairman on his sickbed with his anointed successor Hua Guofeng at his side, saying “With You in Charge, I am at Ease.” Hua would hold power only until December 1978. Deng Xiaoping returned from political exile and persecution to revolutionize China and bring the country into a new age. Deng changed China as profoundly as Mao did in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party’s army defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and drove it and its followers to Taiwan. Little did I know then, at the age of 24, that the parades and celebrations I witnessed in Shanghai marked the beginning of Deng’s political rehabilitation. Nor did I understand that this political “opening” was about to transform China, the world, and also my own life, providing me with the opportunity to be among the first 40 Americans to teach English there, along with a few resident foreign Maoists who had managed to survive the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

China had been shut away from most of the outside world since the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. What the West knew about the Mao years was limited largely to interviews with refugees conducted by scholars and government officials in Hong Kong, and glowing reports from left-wing “friends of China.” When I was at university and graduate school in the 1970s, the United States was reeling from the unpopular Vietnam War. Many American young people were highly critical of the U.S. government and skeptical of its claims that our traditional enemies, China among them, could possibly be as bad as claimed. We knew vaguely about “people’s communes,” which sounded fascinating at a time when our domestic counter-culture movement was also experimenting with collective living. We also knew that in China it was said that “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” a compelling slogan for Western feminists who were expanding their intellectual, political, and personal influence and becoming a truly popular women’s movement. Through “ping-pong diplomacy,” or friendly sports matches intended to break down political barriers, and the limited cultural exchanges that followed the famous 1972 Nixon and Kissinger visit, we caught televised performances by the fantastic Shanghai acrobats, whose back-bending female contortionists could stack bowls on their heads with their feet while standing on their forearms, and whose male gymnasts could create tableaux of 20 figures balanced on a single circling bicycle. We admired naïve and charming peasant paintings that showed nets full of golden carp and fields of abundant harvests, with red-cheeked girls portrayed as members of the “Worker, Peasant, Soldier” proletariat. In retrospect, our romanticism was at best untutored and at worst dangerous. Nonetheless, it was the reason for my determination to learn Chinese, which I began studying in my sophomore year at Princeton, and to go to China to live.

I might have been more sensitive to signs that not everything was as rosy as I hoped, during my first visit in the summer of 1977. My organized group tour consisted of members of the U.S.–China People’s Friendship Association, a populist organization intended to build people-to-people ties at a time when our governments were at loggerheads. At one point, we were traveling by overnight train from Beijing to Xi’an when the guide assigned to spend two weeks with us, a kindly middle-aged lady, returned from the train platform after a ten-minute stop, weeping profoundly. She was sharing a sleeping compartment with me and I asked what was wrong. She told the story of her beloved son who had been “sent down” from his home to the rural countryside to “learn from” the peasants. She had just seen him for the first time since he left home ten years earlier. She explained that the residence card system, which included everyone in China, kept him in exile. His residence card, or hukou, had been transferred to the countryside, keeping him trapped there; he would be unable to obtain ration coupons to buy rice, cooking oil, vegetables, clothing, and other life necessities anywhere else. She missed him terribly.

Also on that trip, an overseas Chinese woman in our group made every effort to contact her relatives and was finally allowed to glimpse them for a few moments. In the company of Party handlers, they were unable to speak freely and she was unable to discover what had happened to them during the Cultural Revolution. Their gaunt appearance and fearful demeanor made her profoundly worried.

However, instead of paying attention to these warning signals, I became more enamored than ever of a country whose people appeared strong and healthy, warmly hospitable, and eager for our help. The women wore the same clothing as the men: blue or green pants and simple white shirts. They wore their hair in long braids or short bobs; they used no makeup, and indeed, there was none for sale. The men had brushy haircuts, bad teeth, and wonderfully winning smiles. The entire country seemed to rely on bicycles for transportation; automobiles were few, and reserved for “distinguished guests” like ourselves or for high-ranking Party officials. The Chinese were clearly thrilled we were visiting – everywhere we drew huge, curious, friendly crowds. Foreigners unlucky enough to be tall or to have blond or red hair were mobbed. The Chinese begged us to come back and help them to develop. Profoundly moved, I was determined to try to make a contribution.

When in early 1979 the phone call came from the Chinese Embassy telling me I had been selected to teach English in Hunan province, I was a master’s degree student in Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. With almost six years of Chinese language training and blessed with short stature and dark hair to help me blend into local crowds, I was as well equipped as any American might have been for the experiences that lay ahead. In retrospect, I was totally unprepared for the shocking stories I heard once I arrived and the moving events I experienced. In the course of those early two-and-a-half years of life in China, I made deep and often dangerous friendships (foreigners were still widely viewed as spies), traveled to numerous places where no foreigner had been, witnessed the struggles of a country recovering from a prolonged nightmare, and found my own writer’s voice as someone who could bear witness to the suffering of a people who had no other court of appeal.

Hunan province was Chairman Mao’s home province. As a result, Maoism ran deep. Ultra-leftist military men were entrenched in power at my university, Hunan Teachers’ College, and they were not at all pleased to be sent a Western foreign teacher, even if (or perhaps especially since) her English was considered an essential tool of the modernization policy of the new government. The “foreign expert” was given a large apartment, by Chinese standards, and fitted with the only air conditioner on the campus. When I turned it on, the electricity in the whole college went out – I refrained from using it. I was assigned a Party handler, a charming young woman teacher whose only duty was to spend every possible moment monitoring my activities. I fought back against her smothering attention vigorously, with eventual success. After several months she was allowed to return to her teaching assignments and instead I was placed under the charge of a genial retired army officer with a second-grade education (the military was still controlling the universities), who let me do as I pleased. I fought also for the right to ride a bicycle instead of being chauffeured in one of the only three cars in the campus garage (what if the foreigner had an accident or went somewhere off limits?) and to practice my passionate hobby, ballet, with the local song and dance troupe, who spoke of their affection for the Russian teachers who had been forced home after relations collapsed with the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. I also fought for the right to attend the required weekly political study sessions for faculty, only to feel confused by the ill-concealed hatred that the professors displayed for the leaders, who sat in front of the room reading Party directives aloud from the official newspapers. The professors whispered loudly, knitted, spat, and showed their disdain; this was hardly what I expected.

But my political education began in earnest when I was at last permitted to teach the students. In my first months, I was considered too precious a commodity to share with anyone but the professors, many of whom were elderly former Russian teachers attempting to retool for the country’s modernization drive. However, in 1977 the first examinations for university entrance had been held since before the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The students were brilliant; no professor was qualified to teach them because most English instructors had built their careers on obscure points of grammar or laborious translations of the classics (one had even achieved professorship for his translations of the poems of Chairman Mao), and at last the top students were put under my tutelage. Many of them were my age, in their mid-twenties, and had studied English in secret, often while in the countryside where they had been sent, like my former tour guide’s son, to...